From the screen of our laptops, and from the ubiquitous portable devices, smart phones, and media players, to the embedded computation in clothes, architecture and big urban screens, interfaces are everywhere. They are simultaneously demanding our attention and computing quietly in the background, turning action into inter-action, and mediating our experience of and relations to the social and environmental. But how can aesthetics respond to this, and how do interfaces set the scene for artistic practices? Interface Criticism is not another design manual but a critical investigation for readers interested in the aesthetic, cultural and political dimensions of interfaces. With contributions from leading researchers within the field, the book covers a wide range of aesthetic expressions - including urban screens, wearable interfaces, performances, games, net-art, software art, and sound art, and discusses how new cultures evolve around, for example, open souce or live coding. The volume critically investigates the aesthetics of interfaces in ways that transcend the iconic surface of the graphical user interface and goes beyond the buttons. Ultimately the book develops interface aesthetics as an appropriate paradigm for a critical discussion of the computer.

How the interface has moved from the PC into cultural platforms, as seen in a series of works of net art, software art and electronic literature. The computer interface is both omnipresent and invisible, at once embedded in everyday objects and characterized by hidden exchanges of information between objects. The interface has moved from office into culture, with devices, apps, the cloud, and data streams as new cultural platforms. In The Metainterface, Christian Ulrik Andersen and Søren Bro Pold examine the relationships between art and interfaces, tracing the interface's disruption of everyday cultural practices. They present a new interface paradigm of cloud services, smartphones, and data capture, and examine how particular art forms—including net art, software art, and electronic literature—seek to reflect and explore this paradigm. Andersen and Pold argue that despite attempts to make the interface disappear into smooth access and smart interaction, it gradually resurfaces; there is a metainterface to the displaced interface. Art can help us see this; the interface can be an important outlet for aesthetic critique. Andersen and Pold describe the “semantic capitalism” of a metainterface industry that captures user behavior; the metainterface industry's disruption of everyday urban life, changing how the city is read, inhabited, and organized; the ways that the material displacement of the cloud affects the experience of the interface; and the potential of designing with an awareness of the language and grammar of interfaces.

Our love affair with the digital interface is out of control. We’ve embraced it in the boardroom, the bedroom, and the bathroom. Screens have taken over our lives. Most people spend over eight hours a day staring at a screen, and some “technological innovators” are hoping to grab even more of your eyeball time. You have screens in your pocket, in your car, on your appliances, and maybe even on your face. Average smartphone users check their phones 150 times a day, responding to the addictive buzz of Facebook or emails or Twitter. Are you sick? There’s an app for that! Need to pray? There’s an app for that! Dead? Well, there’s an app for that, too! And most apps are intentionally addictive distractions that end up taking our attention away from things like family, friends, sleep, and oncoming traffic. There’s a better way. In this book, innovator Golden Krishna challenges our world of nagging, screen-based bondage, and shows how we can build a technologically advanced world without digital interfaces. In his insightful, raw, and often hilarious criticism, Golden reveals fascinating ways to think beyond screens using three principles that lead to more meaningful innovation. Whether you’re working in technology, or just wary of a gadget-filled future, you’ll be enlighted and entertained while discovering that the best interface is no interface.

Helps you design a great user interface by focusing on the most important step in the process - the first one. You learn to go out and observe your users at work, whether they are employees of your company or people in customer organisations. You learn to find out what your users really need, not by asking them what they want, but by going through a process of understanding what they are trying to accomplish. The authors take you through a step-by-step process to conduct a user and task analysis. You learn: How interface designers use user and task analysis to build successful interfaces; Why knowledge of users, their tasks, and their environments is critical to successful design; How to prepare and set up your site visits; How to select and train your user and task analysis team; What observations to make, questions to ask, and questions to avoid; How to record and report what you have learned to your development team members; How to turn the information you've gathered into design ideas; How to create paper prototypes of your interface design; and How to conduct usability tests with your prototypes to find out if you're on the right track.

The original Handbook of Surface and Interface Analysis: Methods for Problem-Solving was based on the authors' firm belief that characterization and analysis of surfaces should be conducted in the context of problem solving and not be based on the capabilities of any individual technique. Now, a decade later, trends in science and technology appear

This text offers advice on creating user-friendly interface designs - whether they're delivered on the Web, a CD, or a 'smart' device like a cell phone. It presents solutions to common UI design problems as a collection of patterns - each containing concrete examples, recommendations, and warnings.

This book concisely illustrates the techniques of major surface analysis and their applications to a few key examples. Surfaces play crucial roles in various interfacial processes, and their electronic/geometric structures rule the physical/chemical properties. In the last several decades, various techniques for surface analysis have been developed in conjunction with advances in optics, electronics, and quantum beams. This book provides a useful resource for a wide range of scientists and engineers from students to professionals in understanding the main points of each technique, such as principles, capabilities and requirements, at a glance. It is a contemporary encyclopedia for selecting the appropriate method depending on the reader's purpose.

This is a pathbreaking work which develops a new form of economic analysis. This collection brings together 27 essays by influential literary and cultural historians as well as representatives of the vanguard of postmodernist economics.

Behind our computer screens we are all cyborgs: through fantasy we can understand our involvement in virtual worlds. Cyberspace is first and foremost a mental space. Therefore we need to take a psychological approach to understand our experiences in it. In Interface Fantasy, André Nusselder uses the core psychoanalytic notion of fantasy to examine our relationship to computers and digital technology. Lacanian psychoanalysis considers fantasy to be an indispensable “screen” for our interaction with the outside world; Nusselder argues that, at the mental level, computer screens and other human-computer interfaces incorporate this function of fantasy: they mediate the real and the virtual. Interface Fantasy illuminates our attachment to new media: why we love our devices; why we are fascinated by the images on their screens; and how it is possible that virtual images can provide physical pleasure. Nusselder puts such phenomena as avatars, role playing, cybersex, computer psychotherapy, and Internet addiction in the context of established psychoanalytic theory. The virtual identities we assume in virtual worlds, exemplified best by avatars consisting of both realistic and symbolic self-representations, illustrate the three orders that Lacan uses to analyze human reality: the imaginary, the symbolic, and the real. Nusselder analyzes our most intimate involvement with information technology—the almost invisible, affective aspects of technology that have the greatest impact on our lives. Interface Fantasy lays the foundation for a new way of thinking that acknowledges the pivotal role of the screen in the current world of information. And it gives an intelligible overview of basic Lacanian principles (including fantasy, language, the virtual, the real, embodiment, and enjoyment) that shows their enormous relevance for understanding the current state of media technology.