Interfaces and Us: User Experience Design and the Making of the Computable Subject

by Zachary Kaiser

Overview

We're all familiar with smart TVs making suggestions on our future watching, real-world exercise data being transferred into stats and infographics on our workout apps and turbaning up our home heating before we start our commute – but how does this world of technological interfaces affect our actions and perceptions of self? When society relies on computer models and their interfaces to explain and predict everything from love to geopolitical conflicts, our own behaviour and choices are artificially changed. Zachary Kaiser explores the harmful social consequences of this idea - balanced against speed and ease for the user - and how design practice and education can respond positively.

- Concepts of freedom vs convenience
- Smart objects and manipulation
- Real world information transformed into data
- Technology's decisions made on our behalf

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781350245242
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Academic
Publication date:	02/23/2023
Pages:	224
Product dimensions:	6.20(w) x 9.15(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

Zachary Kaiser is Associate Professor of Graphic Design and Experience Architecture at Michigan State University, USA. His research and creative practice examine the politics of technology and the role of design in shaping the parameters of individual, social, and political possibility. His work has been featured in national and international exhibitions, and his writing, on topics ranging from the future of the arts in higher education to dream-reading technologies, appears in both scholarly and popular publications.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements
Introduction

1. Historical and Conceptual Roots of the Computable Subjectivity
Introduction: Disrupting the Insurance Industry-“Convenience” and “Freedom”
Producing and Looping, or, Biopolitics and Biopower
The Value of Convenience
Freedom and Countercultural Technocracy
The Selfish System: Cybernetics and Rational Choice Theory
Markets as Information Processors: Cybernetics and Economics
The Neoliberal Governmentality
Conclusion: Foundations and Ramifications

2. Data=World
Introduction: Can You “See” Your Dream Data?
Data and World: An Origin Story
Computational Instrumentation: Templates and Translations
How Computational Instruments Disappear
Conclusion: The Great Inversion, or, Operationalism's Legacy

3. Prediction and the Stabilization of Identity
Introduction: Whisper and the Scrambling of Algorithmic Anticipation
The Digital Production of Fragmentation and Alienation
Ontological Insecurity: One Consequence of Fragmentation and Alienation
The Digital Mirror Self: Soothing Ontological Insecurity with Computation
The Role of UX in Producing, then Soothing, Ontological Insecurity
Consequences: Soft Biopower and the Proscription of Potential
Conclusion: Becoming Cyborgs

4. The Moral Imperative of Normality through Computational Optimization
Introduction: The Optimized Professor and the Pressures of Optimization
Measurement, Normativity, and Morality: Two Origin Stories
The Moral Imperative of Self-Optimizing Technologies: The Case of the Amazon Halo
Consequences: Anxiety, Superfluity, and the Instrumentalization of Interpersonal Interaction
Conclusion: Fighting for Servitude as if it Were Salvation

5. The Questions of Political Economy and the Role of Design Education
Introduction
Question 1: The Issue of Political Economy and Chile's Socialist Cybernetics
Question 2: The Role of Design Education in Resisting the “Reality” of the Computable Subjectivity and the Reformist Approach
Conclusion: Returbaning to Political Economy and the Limits of the Reformist Approach to Design Education

Conclusion: Towards a Luddite Design Education
The Politics of UX and the Computable Subject as the Ideal Political Subject
The Lingering Problem: The Computable Subjectivity and Political Economy
The Revolutionary Approach: Luddite Design Education
A Provisional Program of Luddite Design Education
A Luddite Design Education, Now

Bibliography
Index

Editorial Reviews

"Zach Kaiser's Interfaces and Us dares to peel back the plastic film protecting interface design to reveal how it is both shapes and is shaped by everything from convenience and consumerism to market forces and economic inequality. While finally putting to rest the idea that design is inherently neutral, it's an indispensable guide to the politics of how we interface not just with the digital systems around us, but with late capitalism itself." - Tim Maughan, author of Infinite Detail, Canada

"Interfaces and Us blends theory, art, activism and pedagogy into a cogent story about the making of selves and societies. This incisive text will be an inflection point for design education." - Jenny L. Davis, School of Sociology, The Australian National University

From the Publisher