Interfaces: Seven Laws

Carlos Alberto Scolari carlos.scolari@gmail.com May 2009

First Law: The interface is a metaphor. More than a law itself, this is a definition of the interface. In order to start discussing interfaces we need to clearly understand the meaning of the words. What is an interface? Over recent years this term has become a polysemic wild card: an umbrella-concept that can be interpreted and used in different contexts. Like hypertext, hypermedia or interactive, when we introduce the word interface into a discourse we generate a sense of modern technology. At the beginning of the 21st century the word interface is related to the idea of being wired. But the idea of an interface is not precisely new. The term was born at the end of the 19th century and according to The Oxford English Dictionary an interface defines a surface between two portions of matter or space that have a common limit. Later computer scientists took the concept and used it to define a material device that allows the interchange of data between two systems (for example `the interface between a CPU and a printer or `a USB interface). In a period of fifty years the interface changed from a membrane that separated two substances to a bridge, that is, a piece of hardware that guarantees communication - understood as an interchange of data - between two systems. Some researchers and designers consider that the interface is a conversation between the user and a technical device. This idea was especially important in the 1950s, when computer scientists started developing the first AI programs. An intelligent machine should at least speak and understand human language (Turing Test). From a semiotic perspective, the conversation is between the designer and the user, like in a text-mediated exchange between an author and the reader. From another perspective, the interface is a surface that conveys information to the user on how to use the interface. The instructions on the interface surface have been defined as affordances by Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) experts. In this case

Interfaces. Seven Laws Carlos Alberto Scolari

the best interface is the interface that does not need printed instructions or a manual: the instructions are on the interface surface. Nevertheless, the most common idea of what an interface is in the community of designers and HCI researchers is the interface as a prosthesis or instrument. The spread of personal computers - with operative systems based on the desktop metaphor, WIMPs (windows, icons, menu, pointing device) and designed with the philosophy of WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) - led to this reformulation of the concept of interface. Leading HCI experts like Don Norman author of The Design of Everyday Things - adopt the definition that considers the interface as an instrument that allows the subject to manipulate a technical device. Finally, some researchers and designers believe that the interface is the place where interaction occurs, a border between the real and virtual worlds, or better, a translation space or environment between the users (their experiences, objectives and desires) and the technical device. As we have already seen, the interface is not necessarily the place where a human subject and a technological object interact: theres also an interface between a computer and a printer. If we go another step - as Bruno Latours Actor-Network Theory invites us to do - we could say that in the interface two actors communicate; it doesnt matter if they are human or not. From this perspective the radical opposition between user (human) and device (technology) disappears and we can develop a broader and more ecological vision of the interface system (see the Third Law). However, human interpretative activity is critical for the interface system to evolve (see the Sixth Law). Interfaces have multiplied, and it is possible to find them not only in the analogical objects (the interface of the remote control of a television) and digital devices (a videogame interface) that surround us, but also as company-client interfaces; we should not be surprised if one day we find pedagogues talking about `the teacherstudent interface. Any communicative interchange belongs to the interface universe. From this perspective the place of media reception, that is the space where viewers or readers consume textual content that activates their interpretative skills, is also an interface. When we read a book we have a technological device in our hands that invites us to navigate in it and interact with it. As Umberto Eco explained in The Role of the Reader, we apply scripts and frames from our cognitive encyclopedia and cooperate in the creation of meaning. The Interface is an environment in which technological devices and humans interact, cognitive skills are applied and

Interfaces. Seven Laws Carlos Alberto Scolari

interpretation processes are activated. The same happens when we watch television or listen to music on an iPod. In short: a univocal definition of interface does not exist. At this point interface means so many things that we can make it say whatever we want. Its semantic existence is so weak, fluctuating and soft that we can only metaphorize it: the interface as a membrane, the interface as an instrument, the interface as a conversation, the interface as a place. Each of these metaphors illuminates certain aspects of the interface, privileging some of its properties but at the same time hiding others. Each interface metaphor has a different descriptive value. There are metaphors that illuminate better than others. Or, to express it with greater theoretical precision: certain metaphors tend to show the pertinent traits of the interaction process, whereas others highlight less pertinent aspects. My experience in this field suggests to me that the interface as a place is possibly the best metaphor, the one that reveals the most pertinent traits of the interaction. This metaphor also contains the rest of the metaphors: in a place we can manipulate instruments, perceive information from the surfaces and establish conversations. The metaphor also works like a perception and interpretation modeler agent that guides the interface designers actions. It is not the same to design interfaces in the belief that they are docile instruments in the hands of the user as it is to design them in the belief that they are conversational interchanges. Likewise, it is not the same to study interfaces as if they were a membrane as it is to study them as a space in which semiotic and cognitive processes take place. Each metaphor allows diverse glances at the interface and activates different skills. The conversation metaphor needs to be studied pragmatically, the surface metaphor requires a psychology of perception, and the instrument metaphor brings Marshall McLuhans media theory to the HCI research field. Finally, the environmental metaphor is linked to architecture, city planning and the space-time design, for example dance choreography or the theater. This means that a theory of interfaces is condemned to a dialogue between scientific disciplines. We could spend a whole life time looking for a good definition of the interface. Each of these definitions arrives with a metaphor under its arm: Bread for today, conceptual hunger for tomorrow. At any time a new metaphor that illuminates other aspects may appear, privileging a glance at certain properties and hiding other characteristics of the interface. And while we design, use, reflect, define, classify and write about them, interfaces reproduce, contaminate and live an autonomous existence far away from our semantic ruminations.

Interfaces. Seven Laws Carlos Alberto Scolari

Second Law: Interfaces are not transparent. During the last three decades many researchers and interface designers have insisted on an idea: the best interface is the one that disappears, that is, it is the instrument or prosthesis that the subject does not perceive during the interaction. An interface is transparent when it allows the user to focus on a task and forget about the rest: that is, to forget about the interface. When we strike a nail with a hammer our mind is concentrated on the force and the impact trajectory of the hammer (we are not thinking about our hand holding the hammers handle). If we think about the hammer or, in other words, if we think about the interface well probably hit our finger. Likewise, when we drive a car we pay attention to the traffic and the road signals and not to the gearshift or accelerator and brake pedals. If we concentrate on these devices, well probably run over a pedestrian. The world of digital interactions does not escape this dynamic: a well-designed interface disappears while it is being used and allows us to focus on the task that we are doing. In this precise moment my mind is on the sentence Im writing and not the keyboard. This also occurs when a designer modifies a picture in Photoshop: the mouse and the graphic interface disappear during the process. The dream of every designer is to create transparent interfaces, so that users can become immersed in their tasks and forget about the device. This idea, unquestionable from the users point of view, should be opposed from a theoretical perspective. Whats good for the designer - and especially for the user it is not necessarily good for the researcher. The disappearance of the interface is the utopia of every interface designer, but it is the nightmare of the interface theoretician. The apparent transparency of interfaces should not imply a loss of theoretical complexity (as seldom happens in the works of scholars that uphold the metaphor of the instrument or prosthesis). Even the simplest example of interaction such as clicking on a button or transferring a document to the trash - hides an intricate network of semiotic negotiations and cognitive processes. The interface, like any other place where sense production and interpretation processes take place, is never neutral or transparent. In spite of what numerous interface designers and researchers may maintain, the interaction is far from being an automatic, natural or transparent activity.

Interfaces. Seven Laws Carlos Alberto Scolari

When users interact in an interface remember, the interface is not an instrument but a place - they activate a series of perceptual and interpretative processes. They also apply different kinds of skills, recover experiences and shuffle hypotheses about the interface. Communicative interchanges take place in this interaction and interaction contracts are negotiated between the designer and the users. This multidimensional game gives the interface its shape. It could be said that every interface includes a communication proposal that the user can accept or not. This contractual relationship between designers and users challenges the hypothesis of interface transparency (or automaticity of the interaction). The interface engages in a dialogue with the user. Or better, the user makes the interface speak, explores it, reconstructs its code and interprets it while interacting. But interfaces never do what the designers expect them to do (see the Sixth Law). A system designed for receiving messages can be used for creating virtual communities, and a digital animation software can be turned into a platform for multimedia production. The users co-design the interface and use it in their own way, even overinterpreting it, frustrating the desire of the designers, who try to dominate the process and make the user do what they want. The instrumental approach does not have answers to the users everyday innovation. The instrumental metaphor - that sees all human-made devices as a prosthesis or invisible extension of the body - has become an epistemological barrier that impedes the development of a critical theory (that is, a non-ingenuous theory) of interfaces. In other words: the instrumentalism can offer excellent axioms for the design of new and better interfaces, but its contributions to a theoretical reflection on the interaction processes are very limited. The instrumental metaphor is not enough for understanding the role that technology plays in culture. Finally, interfaces express political relationships, for example the power conflict between designers and users. Scholars like George Landow have analyzed this political dimension in hypertextual networks and described the transferal of power from author to reader. By extension, the interface is also the place of a conflict. Or in other words: interfaces are ideological. Interfaces embody a specific vision of the world the vision of the designer and allow users to carry out certain operations (and not others). Therefore, interface design and use is also a political activity. A critical theory of interfaces must discard instrumentalism. Interfaces are not inoffensive devices that, when well designed, simply disappear. A critical theory of interfaces should put in brackets the concept of prosthesis and lay new metaphors on

Interfaces. Seven Laws Carlos Alberto Scolari

the table. Which new metaphors? I am thinking in, for example, the interface as a network, the interface as a liquid, the interface as a multitude, the interface as a gas, the interface as a skin, the interface as a dance. A new look at the interaction process must begin by disassembling the myth of the transparency of interfaces and exploring new metaphors.

Interfaces. Seven Laws Carlos Alberto Scolari

Third Law: Interfaces form an ecosystem. We open a door by turning a key, turn the light on by flicking a switch or write a text by pressing keys on a keyboard. We are interactive beings. The button is the zero degree of interaction: On-Off. We use buttons and dials to program the TiVO or washing machine, use a joystick to play games and navigate in the digital network, and a corkscrew to open a good bottle of wine. Interfaces surround us. They have always been there, long before the invasion of interactive computer screens. Interfaces were born when Homo Sapiens picked up a stick or a stone and turned it into a tool for hunting or a defense or attack weapon, like in Kubricks 2001. But interfaces do not live in isolation: there is a fertile and conflicting interchange 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 keyboard. And when in the 1960s the computer needed a real-time output device, they had no doubts, there it was, the television screen. Like the synapses of a neuron or the valences of a chemical element, interfaces have the possibility of linking with other interfaces. When two or more technologies make contact with each other, an interface is generated. Similarly, when a technology makes contact with the user, an interface is also born. If nobody uses the technological device, or if the technology does not engage in a dialogue with other technologies, then the possible interfaces become latent, awaiting the interactions that will wake them up. Interfaces, as Claude Lvi-Strauss said about myths, engage in a dialogue and think each other. The gestures and actions of users also slide from one system to another. The drag'n'drop of the first graphic operative systems is now used in videogames, and the movement with two fingers towards the opposite margins of the screen for zooming employed by Jeff Han in his prototype of the multi-touch screen has been adopted by the mini-interfaces of mobile phones. An interaction device can be born in a videogame and reappear later in a software system, a sequence of actions from daily life (such as opening a trashcan and depositing things we wish to throw away inside) can become part of the interactive screen, and an icon used in a computer program may become part of a digital camera interface. The promiscuity of the interface ecosystem has no bounds. The dialogue between interfaces does not discriminate any type of device or human activity. What today is on the screen, yesterday was in the outside world, and what will appear tomorrow in a videogame, will later be found on the Web. Interfaces form a network or ecosystem that is something like a great hypertext in perpetual

Interfaces. Seven Laws Carlos Alberto Scolari

transformation that executes operations of movement, translation and metamorphosis. It could be said that the actual existence and evolution of interaction devices depend 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. Sometimes the conditions for creating an interface do not exist. In Guns, Germs, and Steel Jared Diamond explains that the first evidence of the development of the wheel dates to about 3,400 B.C. near the Black Sea, and, independently, within a few centuries of this date, also in pre-historic Mexico. The first wheels in Eurasia were solid wooden circles made from three planks fastened together, whereas the Mexican wheels were made from a single piece of wood. The ancient Mexicans developed wheels that were only ever used as parts for toys because there were no large domestic animals that could be hitched to carts. It is also possible that an interface does not find good interlocutors for dialoguing. It was perhaps for this reason that the printing press, invented in China a millennium before Gutenberg, did not take off: it was almost impossible to develop a dialogue between the printing press and an ideographic writing system, in which each sign corresponds to a concept. The Chinese printing press was practically born dead, as it did not have any technology or interface to dialogue with. The Latin alphabet, however, is a perfect interlocutor for the printing press and allowed this technology to greatly influence the Western culture, as Marshall McLuhan has explained in depth. Western printing integrated the technology to press grapes to make wine, the alphabet, metal fusing and type molding techniques into the same interface. Before inventing printing, Gutenberg was not a librarian or a copyist in a scriptorium, he was a jeweler. It would have been almost impossible for a copyist to imagine a printing machine. Five hundred years after Gutenberg, something similar happened with graphic interfaces. Several companies tried to bring onto the market a personal computer with a friendly interface: the Apple Lisa (1980) and the Xerox Star (1981) were great computers but, at the same time, commercial failures. In the prophetic year of 1984 the miracle took place: the Macintosh, the machine for the rest of us, conquered the public. The Macintosh integrated in the same interface a WYSIWYG operative system, the laser printer just created by HP and the PostScript language that allowed a dialogue between all these technologies. The union of these three technologies in one single interface revolutionized the way the world understood computation. The situation was repeated two decades later. The appearance of the iTunes software, the progressive reduction in the size of hard disks, the decreased price of

Interfaces. Seven Laws Carlos Alberto Scolari

memories and the development of the Firewire interface, added to the spread of digital cameras, which resulted in the coolest product of the new century: the iPod. The new generation of mobile phones has revived the debate on the limits of the fusion between interfaces. Portable devices now incorporate many functions and properties. The logic of the Swiss Army knife prevails: camera, computer, music player, telephone, television one for all, all for one. There are mobile telephones that read credit cards, that scan bar codes and that can also print receipts or inventory lists. Many of these new devices contain a series of sensors accelerometers, environmental light detectors, infrared systems and magnetometers - that allow environmental data to be collected and, consequently, the surroundings to be adapted. The mobile applications market is expanding every day: now we can configure and personalize our Swiss Army phone! The mobile niche is currently one of the most dynamic sectors of the sociotechnological network: these small devices are absorbing and recombining interfaces and functions from many other devices. Every day new mobile species appear in the ecosystem. Faced with this proliferation of new mini-devices the old personal computer the King Lion of the digital landscape for the last thirty years - tends to lose its centrality and become relegated to a discreet background. At the same time it is possible to observe how a new hybrid species is being born: the netbook. Mobile device interfaces are like phagocytes: they ingest and consume many other devices, media, languages and interaction grammars. What the Web did in the 1990s - that is, to progressively become a place that integrates all kinds of textualities (written, iconic, audio-visual, etc.) mobile devices are doing today. This process could be represented as a centripetal movement that tends to concentrate, integrate and consume everything that surrounds it. It is like a black hole that attracts languages, media and interfaces. But at the same time this movement generates a centrifugal countermovement. At a certain moment the centripetal critical mass - that high-density concentration of media, languages and interfaces - explodes and its expansion wave crosses the cultural ecosystem. In this sense the new mobile device with an interactive screen and an Internet connection are like a pocket-Aleph: a small machine that can generate, reproduce, send and receive any type of content. Its influence reaches the farthest borders of the socio-technological network.

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Forth Law: Interfaces dont disappear, they transform. In the interface ecosystem (Third Law) the moments of agitation and stillness alternate. Sometimes interfaces seem to disappear and be replaced by other interfaces. However, if we analyze the dynamics of this ecosystem from a evolutionary perspective we discover a different panorama: interfaces can rise from their ashes and reincarnate into new devices. Lets look at a couple of examples. In order to be recognized without been completely unfolded, papyrus rolls had a summary sentence or title written on the outside: the incipit. This practice survived in the hand-written codex - which did not have to be unrolled but rather browsed to be read - and in printed books. The text in the papyrus was laid out in columns, a format that we find today in newspapers and on the Web. The actual concept of webpage should alert our attention: in order to give a name to the new online documents Tim Berners-Lee recuperated an already well-known interface. The interface is like a form or shape that can adapt to many material supports or technological devices. The first computers had a command-line interface - like the MS-DOS - that forced the user to interact using the keyboard. The machine only understood command lines formed by a sequence of letters and numbers typed by the programmer. The arrival of graphic interfaces in the 1980s reduced the use of the keyboard to mainly writing operations. Designing an image, changing the contrast of a photography or editing a video can all be executed with just the mouse. But the command-line interfaces refuse to leave us. Theyre still there, on our screens. To use a search-engine, tag a picture or engage in a dialogue in a chat we must use the keyboard and introduce letters and numbers. As if they were made of energy, interfaces do not get lost, they transform. In order to understand how an interface works and develops, first we must be archaeologists. A webpage interface can only be understood as a device that synthesizes six thousand years of writing technologies: it is read vertically like a papyrus, it organizes the text in columns and it employs the typography variations to communicate just like a Middle Age codex or a newspaper. From this perspective the Word Wide Web could be considered a metamedium that concentrates and integrates many other interfaces and communication experiences. The same is happening today in the field of mobile devices. Several evolutionary lines are concentrated in the 3G mobile phone; some of them come from the world of personal computers, others from the telephone, and still others from portable consoles and digital camera interfaces.

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Like Charles Darwin in Patagonia, to understand the interface ecosystem the researcher should discover and analyze the fossils of past interactions. This recommendation is also useful for interface designers. In order to create new interactive environments they cannot discard the study of our ancestors interfaces. Creativity is always a conjunction of past things, never an uncontaminated irruption of the future. An interface could be forgotten for years, but it may come back at any moment, adapted to a new device and activated by a new generation of users.

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Fifth Law: If an interface cant do something, it will simulate it. If interfaces form an ecosystem (Third Law) and they think between them' like LviStrauss myths, then it is foreseeable that inter-interface processes of contamination and hybridation take place. Interfaces also watch each other and, in some cases, they can copy or establish mimetic processes. As we have already seen, during many years word-processing software worked within operative systems characterized by a command-line interface like the MS-DOS. The user did not only type letters to write, all the text manipulations - from copying to cutting, moving, or formatting - were made by typing instructions using the keyboard. The arrival of the graphic interface modified this dynamic: text was still written using the keyboard but the manipulation could be carried out much more simply with the mouse. How did the old command-line word-processing software deal with the diffusion of the new graphic interfaces? It tried to replicate the graphic interface. How? For example, by creating colored rectangles around the commands to imitate the icons of the WIMP interfaces. In other words, the command-line interface simulated the virtual buttons of graphic interfaces. Although the former command-line interfaces did not allow actions like drag'n'drop in their grammar of interaction, they tried to imitate the style of graphic interfaces. In this case the interface attempted to simulate with its own means a function or device originally designed for a much more advanced interaction environment. The first generation of graphic interfaces was bi-dimensional, something like a printed paper. The buttons, icons, folders and documents were represented on the flat screen surface. At that time many programmers and designers were convinced that the operative system of the future would have a three-dimensional interface. How did they anticipate this future? By creating bi-dimensional graphic interfaces that generate a three-dimensional effect. This problem, already deciphered five centuries ago by the Renaissance painters, was solved by incorporating shades in the buttons, creating textures that gave volume to the elements and allowing the superposition of open windows. Nowadays, the bi-dimensional graphic interface simulates a three-dimensional environment. These simulation processes should not surprise the reader, since they do not only affect digital interfaces, but media interfaces as well. A good example of interface simulation may be found in newspaper pages. In the last decade many printed publications have modified their graphic style to resemble that of webpages in order to adapt to a new generation of readers. In these publications the articles are

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shorter, small icons identify the different sections, there are more photos and infographics and the page explodes in a myriad of textual fragments that the reader must recompose like a puzzle. Reading these publications is like navigating through a webpage. However, it is not an interactive newspaper: its just a traditional newspaper simulating a hypertextual environment. While the Internet was searching for its own grammar, it tried to simulate television screens. The push technology (Do you remember the push technology?) offered a series of channels on our computer desktop. It was an attempt to transform Web navigation into something like a televisual experience. The explosive animations made with Flash (detested by the usability experts like Jakob Nielsen) tried to eliminate the browser and convert the surface of the computer screen into a television screen. The users, obviously, refused these proposals. Users want to be users, not television viewers. But the process is bidirectional: the languages of the old media are changing. For example, they are adapting to mobile mini-screens or trying to simulate the interactive experience that they cannot offer to their spectators. How do mass media simulate the interactive experience?: They tell many stories at the same time (like in Desperate Housewives), split the screen (like in 24), build transmedia stories that go beyond one single media (like in Matrix or Star Wars) or break the linearity of the narrative (like in Lost). To interpret this production is not easy. As Steven Johnson puts it, popular culture is actually making us smarter. To understand Lost or to reconstruct the narrative world of The Sopranos the viewer needs to invest the same cognitive capital as they do when they play a complex videogame. The most impressive television format of the last decade the reality show - is based on a group of people interacting inside a video-controlled atmosphere. These characters have complex relations with each other, they create/break alliances and compete for their survival in sometimes hostile surroundings. On certain occasions the spectator participates in the program (for example during the nominations) and plays the game. Any similarities between Big Brother and The Sims are not just coincidences: television is simulating the interactions of the most intelligent videogame of the last decade. And what can we say about Lost, one of the bigger hits of contemporary television? Would this series have been imaginable if there hadnt first been a reality show Survivor and the long saga of videogames that extend from Myst to Exile? The new media researchers have been so occupied analyzing the new experiences that they have forgotten traditional mass media. Television researchers have identified many changes in the screen but they have been so concentrated on the media that they

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have not been able to connect these mutations with the new interactive experiences. Television is part of an ecosystem and, like any other media or interface, it should be studied taking into account the entire network and paying attention to the new species. I have defined these new audiovisual experiences as hypertelevision, which is not interactive television, but rather television that simulates the interaction of digital environments. It seems that interactive screens have become the main obsession of non-interactive screens. Television the unidirectional broadcasting media par excellence cannot compete with graphic interfaces, so it simulates the interaction.

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Sixth Law: Interfaces co-evolve with their users. Interfaces do not only evolve because they engage in a dialogue with each other (Third and Seventh Law), they also evolve due to the dialectic relation between designer and interface-user (Second Law). The Sixth Law takes care of this second type of evolution. The relationship between humans and interfaces can take on three different forms. In the first type of relationship, the subjects can adapt to the interface, cooperate in the construction of meaning and adopt the interaction proposal that the interface recommends. This interaction proposal is the normal use: the use supported by the interface designer and specified in the printed instructions of the device. In the second type of relationship, the users can underuse the interface, and not take advantage of the devices possibilities. Who has ever used all the functions of MS-Word or a 3G mobile phone? Most users usually only use a small portion of a technology. The third form is much more interesting: the user can overuse the interface and make it say things never imagined by the designer. In this case the user goes beyond the printed instructions, making fun of the affordances and the uses of the program that the designer included within the interface, to push out the limits of the interactive practice. These deviated uses are very interesting for the ecology of interfaces. Lets look at a couple of examples. In 1982 the French public company PTT (Post, Tlphone et Tlcommunications) introduced a new service: Minitel, a videotext service based on the phone network. The users could buy on line, reserve trains, control the shareholding markets or make searches in the telephone directory. Minitel was originally designed to consult databases but the French users took control of the technology and deviated it to their interpersonal communications: The technology was used for exchanging information and chatting between PPT clients. In 1988 the Macromind company put an application on the market called Director, a software designed for creating animations by placing elements on a timeline divided into frames. The application also included a secondary function, the possibility of placing buttons and jumping from one frame to another. The program evolved In 1993 Macromind Director transformed into Macromedia Director (version 3.1.3) after a fusion between Authorware Inc. and MacroMind-Paracomp. This new version of Director engaged in a dialogue with a new audio-visual technology developed by Apple: QuickTime.

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Director underwent a large mutation in these first years of life. Although it was originally designed to create animations, the users explored the secondary functions of the software and experimented with the possibilities of Lingo, the powerful programming language of Director. In little time the software designed to make animations ended up becoming the preferred tool for creating CD-ROMs, interactive installations and many other multimedia products. The dialogue with QuickTime (Third Law) favored the convergence of different contents and languages (verbal, iconic, audio, etc.) in the same interactive environment, but it was how digital designers used Director what modeled its evolution. History repeated itself a few years later with Macromedia Flash: a software designed to create web animations ended up becoming an instrument for constructing multimedia websites. Like Director, Flash developed its own programming language and began to engage in a dialogue with other technologies (for example databases). In all these examples we can identify a movement and re-distribution of the power inside the interface: the user is the co-designer of the application. How does this evolution work? Users are not docile subjects perfectly coupled to the technologies. Users can over-interpret the interaction devices and make them say (and do) things not thought of by their creators. These deviated interactions introduce new functions into the devices and sometimes open a new path in their evolution. If users had not used Macromind Director to create hypermedia products, their developers would probably have continued developing the features to improve the creation of animations. The users ignored that possibility and redirected the evolutionary path of the application. An interface contains a series of possible evolutionary paths. Many of them are invisible to their creators. The deviated uses and the contaminations between devices activate these potential evolutions that live inside the interface. This is why it is not easy to predict the evolution of interfaces (see the Seventh Law).

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Seventh Law: Interfaces are subject to the laws of auto-organization. Human history and technological evolution can be easily organized and narrated following a linear succession of events. Henry VII (1485-1509) was followed by Henry VIII (1509-1547), Edward VI (1547-1553) and Johanna I, who only governed during 9 days in 1553. Similarly, Photoshop 1.0 (1990) was followed by the version 2.0 (1991), 2.0.1 (1992), 2.5 (1992), 2.5.1 (1993) and finally version 3.0 (1994), the awaited version that included layers and tabbed palettes. Applying linear models to the evolution of technology, taken to its limits, generates mythical tales full of faith in the future. The marketing experts know this well. We dont want to wait for the new version arriving soon, and live in agitation because we know that what we just bought is already old. When we close the last issue of Wired magazine we know that what was wired is already tired. The series like 1.0, 2.0, 3.0, etc. only show a small part of a very complex and conflictive process. The interface ecosystem makes us think of technological evolution in a different way. How can we represent an evolutionary process without falling into the simplicities of a linear succession? How can we avoid the limits of simply presenting a series of technological versions? Is it possible to complement the linear interpretation with another perspective that allows us to analyze the evolutionary processes from a different perspective? We can imagine the evolution of a system with other metaphors, for example, with the metaphor of the network. If we analyze the evolution of technology from this perspective, we see a different panorama: the evolution of interfaces is not linear, it is reticular. The socio-technical network is composed of technologies, subjects, grammars and interpretation processes. The confluence of these elements creates the interface. At certain moments certain components of the network are linked to each other and begin to make interchanges so that an area of this geography enters a state of effervescence. Like printing in 1450 or Macintosh in 1984, the confluence of a series of technical, cognitive and cultural elements in a specific place and time of the socio-technical network gives rise to the emergence of a new configuration. It can be said that in the 1980s the technologies related to the personal computer lived a moment of great activity. In the 1990s the Web occupied this place and began to remediate other media and interfaces. Currently the most agitated area of the socio-technical network seems to be the mobile device sector. Everyday we hear about a new terminal or interface, someone tells us about a great new free killer application that can be downloaded from an online store, or we read an article anticipating the features of a new mobile operating system. These small interfaces are currently establishing interchanges and

Interfaces. Seven Laws Carlos Alberto Scolari

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contaminations with different nodes of the socio-technical network. At the moment mobile devices can be seen as the central node of a galaxy with connections to television, the Internet, photographs, computer, music, etc. Within some years this sector of the network will reach an equilibrium and the agitation will transfer to another area of the socio-technological universe. These agitations in different areas of the network cannot be fully understood if we study them from the perspective of the linear series of technological transformations. Thinking in a line restricts us to looking backwards or forwards, but thinking in networks forces us to look for connections above and below, right and left, without discarding the past (looking backwards) or the future (looking forwards). If we think in a line, we look for missing links; if we think in a network, we look for relationships. If interfaces form an ecosystem (Third Law) and we analyze their evolution with nonlineal models (Seventh Law), then we can understand many of the processes that these interfaces undergo. During the agitation moments some areas of the sociotechnological network undergo auto-organization processes: a sector of the system shows increased complexity and exhibits emergent properties. In these cases it is useless to look for a single external causality or agent (for example the geniality of Gutenberg or Steve Jobs): it is the exchange dynamics of the interface that cause a new configuration to emerge from the network. The configurations that the socio-technical network may generate and the properties that emerge cannot be explained by the individual properties of each element. Nobody could predict that SMS would be the killer content of mobile phones or that emails would become one of the main activities of the Internet. These configurations exist in nuce - potentially - within the technology, but until they connect with other configurations in a new interface they are hidden from the observer. In a complex system, the whole is much more than the sum of its parts, and what we know of an individual technology or interface is not enough to understand the entire ecosystem. But to understand an interface or to know what can be done with it is not enough. The black and white television included the color television within its possible evolutions, but nobody could have imagined in the 1960s that it would be possible to watch on-demand TV on a computer. Until the interface is released into the ecosystem and interacting with other interfaces, it is very difficult to see its possible evolutions and just how far it can go. Like any complex environment, the evolution of the interface ecosystem is almost impossible to predict and we will never be able to anticipate the configurations that the socio-technical network may adopt.