we all need to learn about the history of interface design
critically-informed co-design, the GUI as a political invention, and building the history of the interface into the collective imagination
First of all, I managed to proofread this before publishing, and actually noticed my mistakes. I have rewarded myself with a cookie for this feat.
Secondly, this is (tentatively) the first part in a two-part investigative series on the history of interface design. The next one is going to be about the guy who designed iOS 7, now works at Airbnb, and the history of the designed document in relation to colonialism, and something about David Greaber/a leftist critique of bureaucracy. Something along the lines of “You Cant Hide Child Slavery With Skeuomorphism” although I am concerned that is a little too on the nose.
Last month, I picked up a copy of “At the Interface”, published by the Soapbox Journal for Cultural Analysis. I had been looking forward to reading it and expanding my understanding of the digital through the lens of media theory. These hopes were quickly dashed, however, when, within the first couple of pages, it states the following:
“Just over a year ago, I attended a research seminar on media cultures where I heard the suggestion that interfaces link experience and infrastructure”
“The interface tends to recede from view when it is working smoothly”
If the author had explored how interfaces evolved to interact with users, they would have seen that linking experience and infrastructure has always been central to interface design. Early graphical user interfaces (GUIs), such as those pioneered by Xerox PARC, introduced affordances like icons and windows that made interactions intuitive by visually representing functions. Apple took this further by making GUIs accessible to the broader public with the Macintosh in 1984, simplifying complex systems through clear visual metaphors, such as folders and drag-and-drop actions. Otherwise known as “linking experience and infrastructure.” The (explicit) goal of these early interfaces is the same as modern interfaces - to make computers accessible to the masses by removing the need to directly interact with the infrastructure. **
Frank Chimero’s essay “What Screens Want” is the masterpiece on this topic.
Earlier GUIs leaned heavily on metaphors rooted in physical objects — buttons that looked clickable or folders resembling paper files. Over time, as users became more familiar with digital systems, these metaphors were stripped away in favour of flatter designs, such as Apple’s iOS 7. These changes reflect a shift in user expectations and design priorities: interfaces now aim to minimise distractions while preserving usability through subtle cues. The excerpt’s suggestion about linking experience and infrastructure is valid but overlooks how this principle has already shaped the evolution of interface design—from affordance-heavy GUIs to today’s minimalist designs. This wasn’t something that was first discovered at a media culture seminar - it’s why interfaces were created. It is widely accepted as the ultimate goal of crafting design interfaces, particularly in operating systems such as iOS, which pioneered and popularised much of modern UX & interface design.
“Good design is invisible” is rule number 1 of good UX - this is called “seamless design”. A media theorist didn’t first observe it; it’s a basic rule of UX. It describes the idea that digital devices should not reveal their limits to users, but instead, their inner workings should be carefully concealed behind pixel-perfect interfaces.
An alternative theory to this is the idea of “seamful design”, which lets users clearly see the limits of the system and therefore understand it better. Most designers use both of these methods, depending on context. The most interesting aspect of theories of seamful design is this study, which demonstrates that it is not difficult for designers to adjust to a seamful way of designing. This would increase the transparency of digital systems, but it is rarely implemented. The perspective of media theorists on this debate, and how we can push for this shift more effectively, would likely be enlightening.
This bias isn’t only present in quirky booklets from vaguely leftist media theorists & artist collectives. I have had to wade through a lot of poorly designed and conducted research on the impact of social media on mental health & society. One of the consistent issues with this research is that the researchers themselves have no idea how social media works. A lot of the knowledge they were missing wasn’t just “why the like button is designed this way to make you hate yourself.” This goes right to the root of interface design - why the field exists in the first place, and how it has developed in relation to surveillance capitalism.
When I read this work, I see smart, capable people who could contribute to a better digital future—but they don’t know what they don’t know. The interfaces that seem to rule our lives did not appear out of thin air; they are the result of a great many decisions, challenges, and cultural forces over the course of decades. Understanding these forces and how these interfaces developed is crucial to fostering a form of digital literacy that enables people to participate in shaping a digital future, and is essential to creating an interdisciplinary approach to analysing and developing our digital future.
When media theorists “rediscover” the obvious, it points not to ignorance but to disciplinary isolation. It's not a personal failing, it’s a systemic one. But it matters. This amnesia weakens the interdisciplinary bridges we need to build a better digital future.
the GUI as a political invention
Embedded within each and every design decision is a range of cultural assumptions. Design isn’t “just” usability. It’s ideological architecture. We are taught to view design as apolitical because it often serves power in this way.
Seamless Design is one example of these ideological forces, which rests on the idea that users don’t need to understand systems. Errors in the system are better concealed so that a more “pleasant” (advertisable) experience can be the norm. So you don’t develop an understanding of interfaces: they remain opaque and mysterious. Taking action against their manipulative nature seems impossible. You can only conclude that the people who designed them are evil geniuses, rather than talented designers caught up in a system chasing engagement, without the bandwidth or awareness to challenge their assumptions. And so the cycle continues. The GUI as we know it, and the nature of social media interfaces as it’s latest iteration, is profoundly shaped by individual and collective assumptions.
There is a tendency on the left to portray this as a conspiracy - it isn’t; it is simply a high-pressure bubble where people often lack the space or time to challenge assumptions. I didn’t even consider the idea of seamless design until I began writing this essay. Because of how we are taught to design, the way interfaces are meant to be created is profoundly shaped by the ideologies of the people who made the field, and they needed to pay their bills. This isn’t a conspiracy; it is just the cogs of a profit-motivated society working as intended.
The people who conceived the idea of seamless design to make computers more accessible to everyday people would not have considered that their ideas would eventually serve as the foundation for a design ideology that enables extractive data capitalism. It simply snowballed because there were no checks and balances. Neoliberal deregulation is what allowed for these checks and balances not to be considered (as my gran always says, literally everything is Thatcher’s fault).
Technological development, including interface design, is often presented to us as a history that is objective, not ideologically motivated, with technology progressing along a clear, linear path. This is true for all technology, as it applies to the interfaces we interact with every day. They, too, have a storied, ideological history. Which of these stories get told and which do not can help us understand what a better digital future might look like.
This disregard for design histories in interface critiques can mean that alternative histories are not highlighted. Without first engaging with the mainstream understanding, we risk further marginalising alternative perspectives on the development of the interface. As you may suspect, this often means that the invaluable contributions of women to the history of the interface are not highlighted in analyses.
Two key names are important to highlight: Mary Wilkes, who designed software for LINC, considered the first personal computer and pioneered user-friendly computing concepts, such as intuitive interfaces and interactive design, that are now fundamental in interface design, and Adele Goldberg, who co-created Smalltalk-80, which introduced overlapping windows and heavily influenced Apple's GUI design. Many more examples of creative alternative technology uses are showcased in the book Play & Politics in the Long Digital Age. These works highlight how political (capitalist) views and societal expectations shape what technologies become mainstream, challenging the view of technological development as apolitical and linear.
Recognising these marginalised perspectives can reshape our understanding of the development of the interface, and by extension, the existence of manipulative design on social media platforms, by displaying more clearly the motivations behind what is adopted vs. what is not, and who is remembered for their achievements.
literacy as liberation
A lot of my work centres on developing a critical perspective of our collective digital malaise through literacy, as an opposition to a restrictive approach. Typically, I present this as a way to critique the systems you live with and connect better with the people and causes you care about. Over the last 6-8 months, I have been thinking more deeply about the extended applications of this approach. I have been revisiting one of the first-ever works that inspired me to pursue this research: The Digital Republic, by James Susskind.
In this book, Susskind discusses citizens’ assemblies as a crucial component of the Digital Republic. These citizens’ assemblies, he argues, would allow a randomly selected group of citizens to advise policy insofar as it relates to digital technology. This would require significantly more public control of social media, which could take the form of publicly owned alternatives or increased public oversight of existing platforms.
Interface literacy, then, is civic literacy.
We can name and frame the digital tools we use—and have a say in how they are crafted. Being able to identify the nature of invisible design and request an alternative approach would require a historical awareness of what invisible design is and what alternatives exist.
Civic movements towards a Digital Republic can only be impactful if people have a historical anchoring. Without this awareness, the impacts of these efforts will be minimal. Taking the example at the start of this essay, if people are not aware of the deliberate choice taken by Big Tech to prioritise & normalise seamless, invisible design, how could they be expected to envision an alternative? Capitalist forces have closely shaped the choices made at each stage of the interface's development. What we truly need in this political moment is a change to a different mode of interacting with the digital, which can only be brought about by an unpacking of our current modes of interaction with the digital.
In my opinion, seamless design is the most critical example in the age of AI. LLMs are designed to give a seamless experience above and beyond everything else - this is why they hallucinate. This is relatively harmless if you are having a banal conversation with an AI chatbot, but with the increasing use of AI in government services, there is a real danger. The UK Home Office has recently introduced an LLM that it argues will halve the time required for asylum claim caseworkers. The problem with this is that the Home Office’s own report states that 1 in 10 responses would show an error. This could mean 1 in 10 claims getting wrongly denied, which they claim is a “small proportion.” What this AI should do is admit when something is not in its dataset and direct the user to the correct resources. This is what seamful design looks like in practice.
In this case, knowledge that “invisible design” is a deliberate choice—and that there is a framework for an alternative approach—would save lives.
the causes of technological amnesia
So why do we have this amnesia of the history of interface development? There are a lot of intersecting factors that cause this phenomenon.
Technological development moves too fast to keep up with, and is messing with our sense of time. This creates a blind spot, where researchers feel that understanding technological development is a fool's errand. The speed at which interface design develops is too fast for many academic and governmental institutions to ensure investigations are conducted in a meaningful way. It can be easy to miss elements in interface design that may be relevant to a critique you are engaging in, despite how obvious those elements may seem to those of us immersed in the topic.
This tendency is deeply tied to presentism—the habit of interpreting current events and technologies as fundamentally new and disconnected from the past. Presentism narrows our analytical lens, causing us to overlook historical patterns and precedents that could inform our understanding of current technological phenomena. This is compounded by digital exceptionalism; the belief that digital technologies, especially social media, are so radically different from previous media that they require entirely new frameworks for analysis. This belief often leads to the dismissal of historical insights that could be highly relevant to understanding the societal impacts of digital platforms.
On a broader level, many of us are stuck in a mindset of viewing many of the world's problems as "unprecedented" when, in fact, they were precedented. This is the case for perspectives on issues such as the 2008 financial crash, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the nature of interface design. Recognising that these were precedented events involves challenging worldviews such as neoliberalism, which does not come easily to many people. Many in the design field responded to this perception of “surprise” not by examining the past or examining their ideologies but by developing new tools and methods, such as systems thinking and futuring, among other buzzwords, to try to imagine different possible futures.
Future planning is becoming a commodity, an industry in its own right, where "futurists" and similar professionals charge exorbitant amounts for courses and related questionable practices. Critiques of this futuring industry see the future as a mode of existence in the present. Advertising oneself as trained in “future thinking” is a way of giving oneself an edge, avoiding the most destructive modes of capitalism. We do not know the shape of what is being worked towards - unlike in the space race, for example, where people knew exactly what they were working towards.
Our inability to imagine a better digital future stems not from a lack of creativity, but from a lack of historical anchoring. This is greatly impacted by the number of LinkedIn keyboard warriors selling “futuring” courses, which is understandably somewhat off-putting to many people on the left, who are analysing the impact of the digital interface. Unfortunately, the loudest voices are not always the most correct ones, particularly in an algorithmic age. So, it’s no wonder that we cannot find our historical anchoring.
critically informed co-design
For this kind of historical awareness to become commonplace, what would an interdisciplinary, historically grounded interface critique look like?
“Critical Interface Analysis” is an approach that emphasises examining interfaces within their cultural, ideological, and political contexts, alongside a rich technical understanding. These approaches advocate for community-engaged design that accounts for lived experience and structural inequalities. We must build a picture of how these forces have shaped the interfaces that shape our everyday lives. Shaping this picture involves an interdisciplinary process, one that includes a technical historical perspective.
This is quite similar to many emerging design practices, such as co-design or participatory design. What makes it different is its interdisciplinary nature. You aren’t just co-creating with users. You are co-creating with experts in their respective fields, including media theorists, political scientists, philosophers, and climate scientists. The list goes on. What this points toward, for designers, is a more analytical form of co-design. One that asks us to consult and co-create in an interdisciplinary way. We shouldn’t just be letting users drive the process. Equally important is the role of the cultural, ideological, and political contexts of the design challenges and interfaces we are working with, as well as how these contexts shape our assumptions and the lived experiences of the people we are working with.
This would be the cornerstone of creating critical literacy - it needs to be genuinely understood first. This means involving people with technical expertise in these discussions. In the example taken at the beginning, the presence of just one designer could have entirely reshaped the course of the conversation, potentially having a tangible impact on the perspectives of both the authors and the readers who purchased the booklet.
The collective imagination is a powerful tool, one I first came across thanks to the one and only Alisdair Gray. He was widely known across Scotland for his arguments about how the collective imagination only has a caricature of Scotland - one of Australian men in kilts in Ireland shouting “freedom.” This has real impacts on everyday Scots, causing us to have to explain to literally everyone that we don’t still live in the Middle Ages, which ties into economic consequences and opportunities in the entertainment industry. This is beginning to change, thanks to the hard work of many business leaders, public sector leaders, politicians, actors, and artists—but there is still a way to go. (so yes i hate the poor things ’ adaptation before anyone asks, it is disrespectful to everything he stood for.)
Interface design, too, is something that needs to exist in this collective imagination. My lived experience of being someone who generally does not exist in the collective imagination has given me a sense of reverence for its power. These histories matter. They shape who we are allowed to be online. To build a better digital future, we must cultivate an understanding of the digital past in our collective imagination. This lets the story of technology be shaped by the many, not the few.
Sources & Further Reading
Review of Research: Critical Interface Analysis as a Heuristic for ... https://www.stc.org/techcomm/2023/10/31/review-of-research-critical-interface-analysis-as-a-heuristic-for-justice-focused-community-engaged-design-research/
Technology and myopia - PMC https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6688405/
The Digital Republic: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2022/jun/19/the-digital-republic-by-jamie-susskind-review-why-the-west-was-no-match-for-the-tech-giants
On the futuring industry: https://parco.gallery/late-futurism-the-future-as-a-mode-of-the-present/
What Screens Want: https://frankchimero.com/blog/2013/what-screens-want/
More on the women mentioned: Women in Tech, Maryville University
Alisdair Gray & collective imagination: https://www.frieze.com/article/why-alasdair-grays-1934-2019-weird-visions-cannot-be-canonized