There is a massive array of interface types, and we interact with many of them every day. The touchpad on a laptop, a remote control, a touch screen on our phones, are all interfaces, allowing us to interact with something “under the hood” that we could not interact with directly. Ultimately, however, the interface is an intermediary. It gets between us and the data we’re hoping to affect. In any given situation, there may be a dozen or more “layers” of what one could call an interface.

As illustrated in examples here (e.g., Nelson’s “the last machine with moving parts”), interfaces determine what can be done in the data world (as I’m calling it–the world in which the data sits and can be manipulated by users through interaction with an interface).

I haven’t before thought about the idea of “beauty,” specifically, in interface design. Elegance, simplicity, and clarity are what most come to mind when I consider the necessities of interface architecture. But beauty, and Gelernter’s “deep beauty,” seem particularly useful in distinguishing functional interface forms.

I also haven’t been exposed to the concept of a “contact surface,” but have done work previously examining book pages, and other physical textual surfaces, as interfaces. It’s true that these interfaces possess essential information experience capacities, not least of all because of the availability of additional tools (e.g., pens, pencils, paperclips) that allow us to augment the physical interface for our unique needs and, in some cases, in ways that go beyond the capacity of most digital tools for text analysis and annotation, in large part due to the limitations of digital interfaces for textual interaction.

Regarding our final project: there are several useful insights from this work. First, we can consider alternative interface schemes; we’ve been considering, primarily, a desktop interface, but what about a screen interface within a museum setting? What about an augmented reality interface that allows us to visualize memes in physical space as we see something different on a monitor, or in another physical space? Second, we can consider streamlined design elements (more “beautiful” designs) to enable cleaner user interactions (for now, our interface is a bit clunky, and burdened with too many features for too small a space, leaving it overly complex and burdensome for inexperienced users). Third, and considering archival interfaces: there are many other options for the presentation of “bulk” data, such as memes of resistance, that we can explore, including more search-based mechanisms and those that focus on a single display element “at a time”, rather than–as we are currently doing–flooding a single interface with too many different types of data.