Learning to Live in the Thick Interface

As media platforms shift towards more dynamic interfaces, the separation between user and content grows infinitely. While advertised as thin, light, and seamless, these platforms mask a thick and complicated space in which society must navigate. This is what I call the “Thick Interface.” The Thick Interface is the portal we use to toggle back and forth and through which we communicate. It is solid and porous, physical and digital, enhancing and diminishing. It may also be a combination of these things simultaneously, or none at all. Through a series of projects, essays, interviews, and case studies, this book highlights—rather than masks—the complexity of this space through interaction, participation, and analogy. The work seeks to visualize and reveal the relationship between the decisions we make in contemporary media platforms and the ramifications of those decisions and challenges designers to provoke rather than mask the complexity underneath our sleek devices and interactions with technology.