Note: this has a date of February 22, 2021, but it was written a good few years ago. Thought it was interesting so i'm reposting. Fyi: you should read Where The Action is by Paul Dourish.

When I read Timo Arnall's post about invisible interfaces a big smile formed on my face. For ages I had a niggling thought in the back of my mind that some of these proposed interfaces and interactions just seemed plain wrong, almost forced. It made me feel like a luddite!

I'm not going to give examples here because I'm lazy and Timo has peppered his article with lots of good references and examples. I do want to talk about two things he mentions:

  1. Embodiment
  2. Foregrounding culture

Embodiment

I love this concept. It's what good solid interaction design should be about. Interactions that occur as part of your world and are in-sync with your assessment of the world.

It's very difficult to talk about this subject with talking about Phenomenology. I'm still understanding and learning about Phenomenology. It's a philosophical study of the structures of experience and consciousness according to wikipedia and in terms of interaction is best summed up by Martin Heidegger's notion of ready-to-hand and present-at-hand.

A device or object that is Ready-to-hand has a seamless quality to it. We forget that it exists and it becomes an extension of us. Heidegger uses a hammer as an example. When the hammer is in our hands and we are about to strike, our hand and the hammer are one united thing, focused on striking the nail. Present-at-hand is when we become aware of the hammer - its weight, it's texture. Instead of focussing on striking the nail, our focus is on the hammer and how it feels in our hands - We focus on the tool, not the job.

When Timo talks about foregrounding culture and backgrounding the technology he is actually talking about being Ready-to-hand. Dourish explains it better than I can:

... as we act through technology that has become ready-to-hand, the technology itself disappears from our immediate concerns. We are caught up in the performance of the work.

This is brilliant. And it's how technology should be. Subservient. This is why Embodied Interaction is so appealing, because it places the emphasis on enhancing your ability to reach your goal through affordance, external cognition, social cognition, all the things we use to get by in normal life, things that are not just familiar but are second nature to use and by refusing to be a distraction.

This is what NoUI really is.

The difficult thing about Embodied Interaction is that its concerns lie within the physical world. It's not something that can be done from behind the glass as Timo puts it. So we when we see apps that reference invisible interfaces and magical UI's, we know it's just nonsense because it's impractical and frustrating for users.

Foregrounding culture

This is basically context on steroids and forms the basis of Embodied Interaction.

There's a good paper on culture and its true meaning by Paul Willis and this, for me, drives home what Ready-to-hand and Embodied Interaction really mean. Paul's definition of culture is:

The relation of wo/man's consciousness, individual and collective, to the objects, and artefacts, both functional and expressive, around her.

He then breaks down this relationship into three parts:

  1. The Indexical Level (How often does the individual interact with that particular culture)
  2. The Homological Level (Is the quality of that culture good enough for the individual to maintain that cultural relationship)
  3. The Integral Level (The degree to which the culture and the individual influence each other)

You complete me.

These three act as a framework of sorts, but It's the last one that binds all the elements within Embodied Interaction. From this point of view, the individual and the (cultural)artefacts are seen as one. They define each other.

So when we focus on culture, as defined by Willis, within interaction design the technology naturally fades to the background. The technology is still visible, but its importance is diminished because it's subservient to the culture and the individual.

This is what NoUI really is.