Third Law of the Interface: Interfaces form an ecosystem
By: Carlos A. Scolari
Tags: UI, Usability, Design, Interfaces, Technology

Interfaces live in an ecosystem and there is a fertile and conflicting exchange among them. When the engineers who created the first computers needed a device to program them, they simply adapted what they already had: the typewriter QWERTY keyboard. And when in the 1960s the computer needed a real-time output device, they had no doubts: the television screen was waiting for them. Like the synapses of a neuron or the valences of a chemical element, interfaces have the possibility of linking with other interfaces. Interfaces, as Claude Lévi-Strauss (1964) said about myths, engage in a dialogue and “think each other”.

The dialogue between interfaces does not discriminate against any type of device or human activity. What today is on the screen, yesterday was in the real world, and what will appear tomorrow in a videogame, will later be found on the Web. Interfaces form a network that looks like an expansive hypertext in perpetual transformation that carries out operations of movement, translation, transduction and metamorphosis.

The evolution of interfaces depends on the correlations that they establish with other interfaces. If the interface does not engage in a dialogue with other interfaces, it does not evolve and it runs the risk of being extinguished (Fourth Law).

The impossible interface

Sometimes the interface does not find good interlocutors for dialogue. The printing press, invented in China a millennium before Johannes Gutenberg, could not become consolidated in that society because it was almost impossible to dialogue with a system of ideographic writing in which each sign corresponds to a concept. As Marshall McLuhan (1962) explained, the interface of the Chinese press lacked an interlocutor: the Latin alphabet. The Gutenberg machine, on the other hand, integrated into one interface the wine press, the Latin alphabet, paper, binding systems and the techniques of fusing and molding lead.

Five hundred years after Gutenberg something similar happened with graphic interfaces. Several companies attempted to market a personal computer with a user- friendly interface (Apple Lisa in 1980, the Xerox Star in 1981), but they failed. Finally, in the prophetic year of 1984, the miracle occurred: the Macintosh, the machine for the rest of us, conquered the public.

Why did the Mac succeed where the Apple Lisa and the Xerox Star had failed? Because it established a dialogue between its graphic operating system, the printer laser of Hewlett-Packard and the PostScript language of Adobe. The union of these three technologies revolutionized the way the world understood computing, created new professional fields such as Desktop Publishing (DTP) and generated the conditions for the personal computer revolution in the 1980s (Lévy, 1992).

Perfect interfaces

The situation happened again at the beginning of the 21st century. As Steven Levy explains in The Perfect Thing (2006), the appearance of the iTunes software, the progressive reduction in the size of hard disks, the lower price of memories and the development of the Firewire interface converged into the coolest product of the new decade: the iPod. The iPod is an interface that integrates different hardware and software elements – a 1.8-inch hard drive, the Firewire connection, the MP3 format for audio compression – with the former Macintosh application for playing and managing music: iTunes. As in 1984 with the Macintosh, the interconnection of actors determined the success of the perfect thing. Just one year after Levy’s book was published it was already old. On 29th June 2007 Apple introduced a new perfect thing with an even more extended network of actors: the iPhone.

This description of high-technology devices that converge into a single interface should not eclipse the human actors that participate in them. Designers (the Apple design team, not just Steve Jobs), institutions of any kind (media, markets, Apple Stores, research labs, etc.) and, obviously, consumers, participate and interact in the network built around these almost perfect – new improved models are presented every semester – interfaces.

Theoretical networks

Social sciences have had an intermittent interest in technological change. Classical thinkers like Adam Smith, David Ricardo or Karl Marx saw mechanization or division of labor as fundamental topics of their economic theories. Nevertheless, from the end of the 19th century to the 1950s the economy was more interested in the equilibrium of variables so that the attention was focused on other fields. The development of a new school of thinking around the Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter brought the problem of technology, innovation and entrepreneurship into focus again.

For many years, researchers believed that the role of inventors was central in the innovation process: that’s why we still talk about James Watt’s steam engine, Thomas Edison’s light bulb, Alexander Bell’s telephone and Steve Jobs’ Macintosh. To every name there is a corresponding artifact, or more than one (Thomas Edison also ‘invented’ the phonograph, and Steve Jobs the iPod, the iPhone and the iPad). This conception is based on the heroic role played by each individual inventor in the creation of a new artifact. Researchers like Nathan Rosenberg (1992), one of the most recognized historians of economy, denounced this ‘heroic theory of invention’ that impregnates our language, patent system and history books.

In this context, the Laws of the Interface prefer to establish a dialogue with conceptions and theories like the Social Construction of Technology (SCOT) (i.e. Bijker, Hughes and Pinch, 1987; Bijker and Law, 1992; Bijker, 1997), the Actor- Network Theory (ANT)(Callon, 1987; Law and Hassar, 1999; Latour, 2005), media ecology (McLuhan, 1962, 2003; McLuhan & McLuhan, 1992; Scolari, 2012, 2015; Strate, 2017), media archaeology (Huhtamo & Parikka, 2011; Parikka, 2012) and media evolution (Scolari, 2015, 2019). The contributions of Arthur (2009), Basalla (1988), Levinson (1997), Logan (2007), Frenken (2006), Manovich (2013) and Ziman (2000) have also been integrated into this interdisciplinary and polyphonic conversation.

The Laws of the Interface, in a few words, proposes an eco-evolutionary approach to socio-technological change based on the contributions of all of these authors and disciplines.

The content of one interface is always another interface

What happens when we deconstruct an interface? The windmill was one of the most important inventions of the Middle Ages. If we deconstruct a windmill, what do we find? A combination of the water mill and ship sails, two technologies invented in Antiquity. If we dismantle the water mill we will find a wheel, an axis and many other technological actors that interact with them. When we open an interface we always find more interfaces. This fractal dimension of interfaces could take the form of a new law or at least a corollary: the content of one interface is always another interface.