Sixth Law of the Interface: Interfaces don’t disappear, they transform

Like biological ones, technological species and their interfaces evolve (Fourth Law). In less than a century the aircraft evolved from the Wright brothers’ first models into supersonic invisible combat arrows or wide-bodied airplanes that carry hundreds of passengers. However, many components of the Wright’s Flyer I are still present in large cargo aircraft as well as fighter jets. The same may be said of other technologies and interfaces. This leads us to a question: Do interfaces become extinct?

Story of two Bibles

Two Bibles are displayed in the Library of Congress (Washington, DC): the manuscript of the Giant Bible of Mainz and the first Bible printed by Johannes Gutenberg. The Giant Bible is composed of 459 vellum pages bound in two volumes. The text was written by the same hand into two columns of sixty lines each. The decorated initials, the illuminated images (made with very thin gold sheets), the rubrics and the regularity of the letters make the Giant Bible of Mainz a work of art that expresses the highest level that manuscript production reached in the 15th century. Gutenberg’s Bible, exhibited a few meters away from the Giant Bible, is one of the 180 copies printed in his workshop in Mainz around 1455. This particular copy is one of the thirty-five printed on vellum. Gutenberg’s Bible is composed of 1,282 pages of 17 x 12 inches. Like the handwritten version, the text is distributed into two columns but in forty- two lines. The images and colors were added after the printing process, by hand, as in the not so olden times.

If the Giant Bible of Mainz is a capolavoro of medieval manuscript production, Gutenberg’s Bible is an example of technical reproduction that still surprises us today by its perfection. Never have two cultural objects been so far apart: one is the refined output of hundreds of years of manuscript text evolution, while the other inaugurated the era of mechanical reproduction and mass culture. But, at the same time, the Giant Bible and Gutenberg’s Bible show many continuities in their interface: both were produced on parchment, the text is distributed into two columns and includes handmade decorations. The width of the margins of Gutenberg’s Bible is based on the golden ratio of the manuscripts, and the abbreviations printed by Gutenberg were the same as those of the 15th century copyists. However, the first generation of printers soon included new elements in the book's interface, for example the frontispiece. The tension between continuity and discontinuity is a constant of the evolution of interfaces. And the best place to detect and interpret these continuities and discontinuities is the interface itself.

The evolution of digital user interfaces

Past and present coexist in the interface. The early 19th century typewriter designers drew inspiration from the piano keyboard; some of these pioneering models were even known as the Cembalo Scrivano or the Literary Piano. The telegraph – like the Electro-motor Printing Telegraph designed by George Phelps in 1884 – also borrowed the keyboard from the musical instrument. Years later, the keyboard turned into little metal circles and went from typewriters to personal computers, and from there to mobile devices (Tenner, 2004).

The first computers had an alphanumeric interface — like the MS-DOS system- that forced the user to interact with the machine using a keyboard inspired by the typewriter. The diffusion of graphic interfaces in the 1980s moved many interactions from the keyboard to the mouse. However, the alphanumeric interfaces refused to abandon us: to use a search engine, communicate in a chat or modify an article in Wikipedia we must use the keyboard. Interactions in social media remain mainly alphanumeric.

To understand an interface we must first be archaeologists. The World Wide Web interface can only be understood as a synthesis that concentrates six millennia of writing technology: it is displayed vertically as a papyrus scroll, it organizes the text into columns like clay tables, and uses typographic variations to hierarchize contents like a medieval codex or a printed newspaper. This promiscuity of the World Wide Web interface also includes videos from television, infographics from printed newspapers, and interactive navigation devices inspired by electronic and mechanical devices. More than a /medium/, the World Wide Web is a /metamedium/. In the same way, the interface of a mobile device concentrates several evolutionary lines, from personal computing to telephony, not forgetting the legacy of portable video game consoles or digital cameras.

Survival or extinction?

In the biological field, mutations generate new species that, chosen by a natural selection, adapt and reproduce with greater intensity. It could be said that these mutations are a natural form of innovation. Specimens that do not adapt to the environment become extinct. In this context: Can interfaces become extinct? In the ecosystem of interfaces there are alternating moments of agitation and stillness. Sometimes interfaces seem to disappear and be replaced by other interfaces. However, if we analyze the dynamics of this ecosystem from an evolutionary perspective, we will discover a different panorama: interfaces or their actors can be reborn from their ashes and reincarnated in a new network of actors. That’s because it is not so difficult to find iron bridges that follow the patterns of stone bridges, hammers that keep the same shape for thousands of years, or reading gestures (like browsing) that pass from the book to the interactive screen.

The conflict between continuity and discontinuity appears in every artifact that we dissect on the table. The problem is not in the evolutionary processes but in the point of view that the researcher adopts. Continuity and discontinuity are not so much properties of technological evolution as two opposing approaches to that evolution. Both vectors, continuity and discontinuity, are always present in the evolution of interfaces, which leads us to think that they can never be considered totally extinct: sooner or later one of their actors may reappear in another interface.

Note: This text is a synthesis of my book Las Leyes de la Interfaz published by Gedisa in 2018.

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References

Tenner, E. (2004). Our Own Devices. How technology remakes humanity. New York: Vintage Books (Chapter 8).