the ui is the computer

[first in a series and preface to the rest]

1. Here’s an idea that’s so basic and so true as to ring strange: the UI is all there is. For us humans, there’s no access to the computer but through the UI; so the UI is computation. The UI is the computer.
2. It’s useful to distinguish little u.i. — the interface to some specific application, built as a particular arrangement of standard elements like buttons, scrollbars, text entry fields, menus, etc., all accessed via a point-and-click modality — from big UI. Big UI is the OS-level whole (Mac OS X, Windows, …) that defines and provides and circumscribes those elements. We’re interested here in Big UI.
3. So far there’s been exactly one Big UI, and it’s thirty-odd years old.
4. One of the most valuable things we can undertake as a technological species (because that’s what we are now, like it or not) is to build a new Big UI. This is not just redress for the embarrassment of three decades’ stasis; it’s critical to the healthy forward development of a humanity that’s interlocked with tech.
5. Getting to a new UI is so important because the rest of the computer — the part we can’t directly see or touch or feel — has been mounting a pure vertical ascent during UI’s flabby slumber. But as UI is the sole means by which humans and machines interact, so today there’s a basic communications mismatch: like being forced to use tree-rodent sounds to explain yourself to a librarian.
6. The new UI, by contrast, will be radically more expressive. It’ll let us say what we want and mean and need to say — by evolving a primitive grammar; by making whole a stunted syntax; by adding vowels and consonants to an alphabet that today has only d, k, p, v, and sometimes y.
7. It’ll be radically more capable, too. To be able to see more and say more is to be able to do more. The new UI will be a dextrous exoskeleton for human intent, for human synthetic will.
8. Viewed through a political scrim, the need for a more capable UI is an issue of basic literacy. Being able to apprehend and transmit meaning by reading and writing is a prerequisite (in the non-digital arena) for progress, for socially tenable self- and group-determination. Other way ‘round: illiteracy impedes human progress. By analogy, a too-limited UI precludes us from properly shaping the digital clay that forms a big part of life. We’re unwise to let impoverished UI cede our determination to those few who control enough esoteric technical wherewithal to do this shaping instead. We’re naive not to know the risk.
9. Viewed through a functional silk, the need for a more capable UI is a howling urgency. The world’s ever more complex, and the solutions to its problems demand more sophisticated thinking, tools, patterns. Of course it’s not just the world’s problems; discovery and invention around its luminous potentials beg better instruments no less.
10. Viewed through a design gauze, the need for a more capable UI is the most invigorating opportunity imaginable. We’ll know we’re getting there when the new systems are adroit amplifiers for minds and hands; when they feel more like the human world than the machine world; when they shimmer with a deep but wholly accessible aesthetic; and, perhaps most of all, when they offer a measure of basic exhilaration. That is to say: using them should bring the tingle along the brain-gut axis that accompanies making music or swimming or laughing or any of the countless other human moments that are about cognition wrapped in a living body.
11. Designing this new UI thus requires opening the aperture to consult more than just computer science and other gridded landscapes of technical abstraction [a], [b]. The important lessons, clues, cues come rather from architecture, from biology, from cinema, from dance, … and so on through the twenty-six ecstatic fields that treat the movement of physical stuff through space and time. Part of the new UI’s efficacy will come from enacting a kind of assisted synesthesia, from working via potent allusion to non-digital human modes.
12. It’s hard to perceive the inadequacy around current human-machine interaction; we’ve been bent over so long that we can’t even look up to see how low today’s UI ceiling is. But, realizing this, it doesn’t take much effort to imagine: if not the exact form then the visceral feeling of standing to use a properly powerful UI.
13. To be clear, the consequence of using the new and properly powerful UI won’t be one of degree; it won’t merely be that we’ll get the same things done faster. It’ll be one of kind: we’ll be able to build the previously unthinkable, analyze what was before impenetrable, understand the otherwise too vast or inscrutable.
14. Enough faluting. This new UI needs to look like something. It needs to work some way. To get started at all — and it’s high time, is the whole thing — we need a strong point of view from which to build; and the stable plinth here rests as usual on three points. Axiomatically, the new UI will be (1) spatial, taking into explicit account the locations of both pixels and humans throughout a real-world space; (2) collaborative, allowing more than one person to interact in meaningful parallel with every system; and (3) superorganism-like, so that a single continuous interface may in truth be running across multiple federated heterogeneous machines.
15. These three defining characteristics [c] are complementary to the way today’s UI is built and understood; a little thought will reveal that they’re also supersets of current UI character. On offer is thus to extend, not supplant, what we’ve got. The result will nevertheless be wholly transformative: consider the tectonics of the world’s switch from the CLI (command line interface) to the GUI (graphical user interface). Now square those tectonics to bridge a syllogism: CLI is to GUI as GUI is to … what? Implementing the three axioms asserted here gives the answer.
16. This series will develop and illustrate the fifteen topics and three character-axioms foregoing (along with other like-aroma’d subjects we’ll wander off the path to snout around). Examples will be mercifully legion — this is the stuff we’ve been working on in various forms at Oblong Industries for the better part of a decade, and the work’s genetic strands twirl backwards through Minority Report and Iron Man to the 1990s MIT Media Lab. So no theory here; it’s all real, inevitable, and intoxicating.

. . .

[a] Construction of a new UI is not a temporary design distraction after which we — what — go back to the business of some other ‘real’ digital work. It is a genuine and freestanding domain, a lifetime’s occupation for those weirdly wired for it. This is partly because it’s a big task requiring the synthesis of design and engineering at roughly the molecular level. (And as the Macintosh team found back in the very early 1980s — the last time the human race built a completely new UI — you can’t build just at the surface; if the UI is sufficiently new then to support it you’re going to end up building hugely valuable technology strata all the way down to the silicon.)

[b] Real movement of the UI after three decades with the clutch stuck down is also the kind of work that uncovers new territory at a rate proportional to that of nearing the known map’s edge. (This endless unfolding is a property not so much of work on UI as of foundational work of any kind.) Uncovering each basic principle immediately suggests a half-dozen essential projects or products, and each of those guides further refinement of the UI. The proposition is one of long-haul learning.

[c] The new UI actually also needs to (4) embrace principles of comedy, of humor, but this is a proposition that so discomfits and offends men of customary purpose that it’s best to leave it alone for now.