The Invisible Interface

In "Understanding Media," Marshall McLuhan writes that the technologies we create extend some function of our physical selves. A lever extends our arm. A bicycle extends our feet.

When it came to mass media, he classified print and radio as electric media. Electric media, he wrote, are primarily extensions of our central nervous system.

By thinking about TV and radio in this way, he was able to deeply understand much of the nature, significance and the impact on human perceptions of their world through the use of these media. In fact, so deep was his understanding that a lot of what he wrote about the significance TV and radio really seem to apply more to the World Wide Web than to TV and radio. He was ahead of his time; he died before the Internet was fully born.

Seeking Perfection In Interface Design

I've been thinking a lot about this idea lately, and what it means for what I do, as an information architect. I've been thinking about what interfaces will look like in a thousand years. Because I have no crystal ball, what that means, really, is I've been thinking about what a perfect (by today's standards) human-computer interface would be like.

Today we primarily use buttons and pointers to interface with a machine. And these buttons and pointers themselves interface with several layers of software that control hardware that connect to the Central Nervous System that we call a computer network, or the Internet.


Compared with our actual central nervous system, this is an extremely clunky interface, requiring a significant amount of training and cognitive skills. Amongst other things, we have to know how to read and write to be able to operate a computer. And that's just the beginning... we need to know how to turn it on, connect it to a network, operate a pointer, understand software conventions, etc.



Our own interface with our central nervous system is completely invisible. As I'm typing this, there is very little barrier between my thoughts and the actions of my fingers. I don't have to access pulldown menus or hierarchies like Movement-->Digits-->Index Finger-->Push-->Letter D. (And that's oversimplifying the task of typing the letter D).

And even though there is no visible interface, we still manage to get a lot of things done.

If you accept that computer networks are an extension of our central nervous systems, then it stands to reason that the perfect interface with such a technology would be an invisible, completely smooth interface, perhaps the kind of interface we may see in a hundred or even a thousand years.

Eventually, we'll get so pissed off with keyboards, mouses and even multi-touch interfaces that we'll ditch them in favor of, oh, I dunno, holographic or cybernetic interfaces controlled by gestures, words or thoughts.

We may even modify our bodies to be more compatible with our technologies. Computers will have shrunk infinitesimally small, and the age of ubicomp will truly be here. It's quite possible, as well, in that kind of timeframe that we'll do away with the binary base that our technology uses today and use something based on a dna-like biological technology. Something that delivers on many of the advantages of digital, without the complete stupidity of it.

It's interesting to think about a completely smooth or even invisible interface that mimics what we would consider telepathic-like capabilities. Interesting structures would need to be in place to filter out messages from other people, in much the same way we create software structures like groups. It's also interesting to note, supporting the central nervous system theory, that messages are getting much shorter and more "thought-like" (I'm thinking twitter here).

Thinking about this kind of a future puts designing software interfaces into perspective. The implication, at this kind of timescale, is that if you're trying to develop something to stand the test of time, you should be looking deep inside the minds of human beings to understand how they work, and not limit yourself to how technology works today. In the end, it's all about people.