In “So the Colors Cover the Wires: Interface, Aesthetics, and Usability”, Matthew Kirschenbaum mentions how our desktop views in laptop and/or computer systems are “oddly unlovely, dull and listless”. I find this interesting because technology seems to be advancing at a rapid rate, so we can see the many changes that go into interface design, especially with computer systems and also cellular “smart-phone” devices. One personal example would be my experience with Windows XP. With this interface design, all you had was a desktop with a background and various icons, a start button, and some utility icons on the bottom right. Compared to contemporary interface designs, Windows XP seems too flat and boring. There were ways to customize your home interface screen by downloading different interfaces online, but for the most part, the theme remained the same. You can also change your background wallpaper, but that was pretty much it for customization. The look for this interface remained for a long, long time until Windows 8 came out. With Windows 8, we can definitely see a drastic shift in design. Your homepage is no longer the desktop screen but a colorful arrangement of tiles and icons that display the top files or the most useful applications. Here, we can tell that Windows focused much more on the artistic design of the interface, perhaps to appeal to the touchpad or tablet device market.
I bring this up because, in his essay Kirschenbaum quotes a passage from Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The Artist of the Beautiful”. In this passage, we read about how a tiny, mechanical butterfly flutters forth from a jewel box. Hawthorne describes this butterfly in such a life-like, real, and beautiful way that it seems like the butterfly was not man-made. This butterfly seemed more than real; it had some sort of character that was spiritual, perfect, and captivating: “‘Wherefore ask who created it, so it be beautiful?’ … ‘it may well be said to possess life, for it has absorbed my own being into itself; and in the secret of that butterfly, and in its beauty … is represented the intellect, the imagination, the sensibility, the soul of an Artist of the Beautiful!” The artist’s creation is a reflection of his soul, an energy or an aura that pulls the interactor into the artist’s sense of being in way where our being emerges with the creation. I thought that this was fascinating because I can see a pattern these days especially where people become attached to their phones (ex. Iphones) in peculiar ways. Without their cell phones, they feel naked and lost. It’s as if their phones are an extension of themselves or at least carry a part of them. Whatever it is, there is definitely some sort of technological or digital fetishism that is occurring these days.