Special Issue: Critical Technical Practice(s) in Digital Research

Convergence: The International

Journal of Research into
Interface critique at large New Media Technologies
2022, Vol. 0(0) 1–17
© The Author(s) 2022

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Michael Dieter  sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/13548565221135833
University of Warwick, UK journals.sagepub.com/home/con

Abstract
This article considers how the pursuit of problematization advocated by Agre’s concept of critical
technical practice has been articulated in relation to the increasing proliferation of interfaces across
everyday life. While the ethos of Agre’s work to bridge the split identity of critique and craft can
readily be found in reflexive design or software art, these cases are not always situated within
broader ecologies of practice that also grapple with the asymmetries and exploitative aspects of
interface design. Drawing from software studies and media theoretical accounts of the interface as a
fluid milieu, I provide a navigational matrix to contextualize modes of interface critique at large,
namely specifying traps and enclosures, surfacing asymmetries and augmenting alternatives. I argue,
finally, that these modes provide an invitation to develop new metacritical theories and common
capacities, particularly through the possibilities of grappling with systems of domination otherwise
built to prefigure our experiences of them.

Keywords
Media theory, interface design, design practice, critical HCI, software art, software studies, digital
aesthetics, interface critique

Blending reflexive critique with the functional craft of design, Philip Agre’s (1997) concept of
critical technical practice (CTP) was first conceived to ‘cultivate awareness’ and challenge the
customs and inherited habits that shape computational work, especially from ‘the planning view’ of
digital systems design that dominated early artificial intelligence research. Poised as a means to
overcome the impasses of cognitive information processing (or ‘mentalism’) in this domain, the
proposal for CTP was also animated by a sense of socio-political urgency. For Agre, there was a
looming sense of danger from the tendency for computational analysis, design and implementation
to impose itself and reshape, not merely represent, existing zones of everyday activity, governance
and labor, to the extent that ‘computing has been constituted as a kind of imperialism; it aims to
virtually reinvent every other site of practice in its own image’ (p.131). The encroaching logics of
‘the computer world’, according to Agre, produced complex borderlands in which a majority of

Corresponding author:
Michael Jason Dieter, Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies, University of Warwick, Coventry CV4 7AL, UK.
Email: m.j.dieter@warwick.ac.uk
2 Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies 0(0)

people struggled to make sense of the technological abstractions and obfuscations they were
confronted with. Today, these dynamics have arguably only become ever more insistent through the
dispositions and logics of corporate platforms, where regimes of user experience design (UX)
valorize an aesthetics of invisibility, targeted personalization and an ongoing experimentation on
users from behind the scenes, generating conditions that the philosopher Frédéric Neyrat (2018) has
referred to as ‘saturated immanence’.
This article considers how the problematization of software rationalities and norms advocated by
CTP has been elaborated in relation to the proliferation of interfaces throughout everyday life. In the
context of academic research, for instance, Agre’s interventions have led to efforts to bridge the split
identity of critique and craft through proposals like reflexive design (Sengers, et al. 2006), humanist
HCI (Bardzell and Bardzell, 2015) and theorizations of software art as interface criticism (Andersen
and Pold, 2018). Acknowledging the various strengths of these initiatives, I equally take note of a
gap or disconnect that exists between such inquiries and the kinds of critical work broadly entangled
with more industry-based practices of interaction design as a whole (Gray, et al. 2018). Accordingly,
in this piece, I discuss cases of interface critique at large, building bridges between these other
domains influenced by CTP, while also situating and rethinking some of their key tenets. Assisted by
media theories of the interface, I conceptually map several important ways these domains navigate
the fluid convolutions of interfaces to generate public understandings of their operativity, including
specifying traps and enclosures, surfacing asymmetries and augmenting alternative experiences;
what might be considered as a navigational matrix for exoteric interfacing. I argue, finally, that a
consideration of these wider ecologies of practice might facilitate not only a deeper articulation of
interface ethics (Dourish, 2019), but also new potentials to collectively grapple with extractive
systems otherwise built to prefigure our individual experiences of them.

HCI, software art and beyond

Agre’s notion of CTP has been influential across several fields in ways worth briefly unpacking.
Within HCI, while inspiring new understandings of the discipline’s historical evolution through
critiques of dominant paradigms over time (Harrison, et al. 2007), it has in general provoked a
profound recognition that digital technologies both embody and unsettle taken-for-granted so-
ciocultural values (Nissenbaum, 2001). This has, consequently, led to the elaboration of new forms
of critical design, tactical intervention and activism over the past two decades. Such engagements
have been further reinforced through initiatives gathered up by the term ‘humanistic HCI’, which
have advanced the interdisciplinarity of CTP along interpretive and hermeneutic lines; that is,
‘research or practice that deploys humanistic epistemologies (e.g. theories and conceptual systems)
and methodologies (e.g. critical analysis of designs, processes, and implementations; historical
genealogies; conceptual analysis; emancipatory criticism) in service of HCI processes, theories,
methods, agenda-setting, and practices’ (Bardzell and Bardzell, 2015: p. 3). These frameworks
essentially follow the ethos of CTP by adding further impetus to questioning norms and pre-
sumptions that have shaped various subfields of HCI research.
CTP, moreover, has led to various proposals for transdisciplinary and ‘second-order’ reflexive
initiatives. As the predominance of computer science and cognitive psychology doxa has been
challenged and transformed through the application of perspectives from science and technology
studies (STS), artistic practice and cultural studies, metacritical positions such as reflective HCI
emerged shortly after the turn of the century (Dourish, et al. 2004). Following the appeal to import
new epistemological and methodological perspectives, reflective design aimed to take such
Dieter 3

developments into account by offering ‘a systematic approach to folding critical reflection into the
practice of technology design’ (Sengers, et al. 2004, p. 49). Drawing from traditions of Marxism,
feminism, critical race theory, media studies and psychoanalysis, the overarching goal was not only
to advocate these lineages as a resource for HCI researchers, but to design systems for users
themselves to become involved with critique, so that ‘reflection itself should be a core technology
design outcome’ (Sengers, et al. 2005, p. 50). While converging with many closely related
frameworks, including participatory design, ludic design, critical design, value-sensitive design and
reflection-in-practice, developments such as reflective design ultimately take inspiration from
critical theory, particularly with a commitment to ‘unveil’ the unconscious thoughts and habits of
actors, bringing them to consciousness in pursuit of new knowledge and experiences. This strand of
HCI, moreover, has frequently enlists aesthetic experimentation to pursue these ends, partly to
navigate how designing for experience frequently risks implementing reductive frameworks based
on usability, rather than experimenting with more radical suspensions of prescribed meaning,
behavior and knowledge between users, designers and systems. At stake were processes of ab-
straction and data extraction whereby emotional states might be rendered as merely informational
units, or approaches that treat ‘experience as something to be poured into passive users’ (p. 1). By
contrast, interpretative attitudes might arise through the deployment of aesthetic strategies like
ambiguity, exaggeration and defamiliarization, an approach influentially deployed in ‘design
probes’ (Gaver et al., 2003), which would pave the way for later formations like speculative and
critical design (Dunne and Raby, 2013). This metacritical trajectory can take off into realms
somewhat removed from Agre’s concerns, yet remain troubled by the ambiguities of designing for
autonomy and the proper role of the designer (Höök, 2004).
Distinct from these lineages, another idea of interface critique has been elaborated at the in-
tersections of software art and media theory in Europe. This version arose through net.art and
tactical media in the late 1990s and early 2000s as fostered by the V2_ Institute in Rotterdam,
Furtherfield in London, Transmediale in Berlin and the Readme travelling software art festival,
which has further migrated into more recent developments like the Interface Politics conferences at
HANGER Barcelona and the Interface Critique publication series run by Florian Hadler, including
texts like Olia Lialina’s (2021) important series of essays on ‘resisting alienation’ in HCI written
during the 2010s. Christian Ulrik Andersen and Søren Bro Pold’s (2018, 2021) work offers one
notable representative survey and theorization of this domain. Seeing computers as accumulations
of mental labor, Pold and Andersen have argued that contemporary interface design encourages the
user to forget the abstraction involved in programming along with the material conditions of digital
signal processing. Their account foregrounds the politics of a specifically artistic style of interface
critique found in works by Lialina, UBERMORGEN.COM, The Critical Engineering Working
Group, Ben Grosser, Joana Moll and others. Central to their account is Benjamin’s conception of the
capacity for an artwork to reflect on its own conditions of production to reveal historical ‘tendencies’
within relations of production. Critique becomes a dialectical exploration of the role of the apparatus
in shaping labor, sense and perception, organization and thought. Following the integrative dy-
namics of cloud computing services, platform corporations, smartphones and ambient sensing,
moreover, this apparatus shifts toward a more ubiquitous ‘metainterface’ state. Transformative
artistic techniques, accordingly, aim to avoid ‘supplying’ the metainterface through extractive data
profiling by intervening to redirect subjectivation toward a new common capacities. While covering
some similar grounds as reflexive design, accounts like Andersen and Pold’s are also unique by
providing an alternative vision of what CTP might mean beyond the auspices of HCI; the works they
discuss often utilize distinct cultural resources, like avant-gardism and the entwined political-artistic
4 Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies 0(0)

traits of tactical media, to embed themselves directly within digital infrastructures via appropriative
means and gestures.
While taking stock of such theories, projects, cross-disciplinary exchanges and discussions that
have emerged since Agre’s provocations, in this article, I want to consider whether interface critique
might be productively considered in even broader and more diverse terms. What can be gained, for
instance, by widening the scope of the term beyond the intricacies of academic HCI debates or
theories of software art towards a horizon of what might be called critical technical cultures? The
approaches above, I suggest, are concerned with constructing systems that mediate specific un-
derstandings of critique – often calling on aesthetics to mediate these re-deployments – but they do
not always consider how these dynamics already play out across today’s expanded borderlands with
‘the computer world’. Indeed, in the case of critical HCI, many of these frameworks arguably risk
performing a ‘repackaging of design within design’ (Fry, 2009: p. 3) by retaining the latter’s
unspoken authority as an academic and professional territory. While building for autonomy is a
worthy aspiration, how do we unmake interfaces of domination and exploitation already such a part
of our everyday lives? Similarly, how might the veracity of Benjaminian interface aesthetics connect
to, contaminate and travel along other circuits of informational production within ecologies of
practice? Here, an additional influence comes from the pragmatic sociology of critique, which
focuses on where, how and why actors practice critique throughout social realities, aiming to revive
critical theory by returning to things themselves, in this case, the emergence of disputes. Of central
importance is the principle task “to explain, clarify and, where possible, model the methods
employed in the social world to make and break bonds” (Boltanski, 2011: p. 25). While concerns
have been raised around the extent to which digital technologies circumvent such forms of liberal
critique altogether (Davis, 2020), I turn to milieus of design practitioner-based critique in which
interfaces as formats of capture themselves become the focus of socio-technical examination. In
doing so, I draw from media theoretical and software studies approaches to clarify and situate
critical competencies of practitioner-based design, particularly as they tackle the kinds of spatio-
temporal involutions of control and subjectivation associated with interfacing. My approach thus
aims to clarify a range of diverse, yet related cases that might not otherwise be considered in the
same context. It builds bridges between theories of interface critique and technological dependency
towards an analysis of those tools, techniques and methods that can expand common capacities to
identify and act against exploitative regimes of UX.

A vortex of agencies
Challenging computational customs and inherited habits, as Agre’s CTP envisioned, has only
intensified as cloud-based platforms and data-intensive infrastructures have become increasingly
enmeshed with the everyday. Today’s digital infrastructures reach into pre-individual processes to
generate global cognitive assemblages (Hayles, 2017), but they also institute mechanisms of capture
supported by micro-temporal sensing and information processing (Hansen, 2015). Interfaces play a
central, yet enigmatic role in these regimes: they govern sense, perception and cognition, while
appearing to disappear into the background. As dynamic thresholds, they complicate conditions of
possibility for reflexivity. As prefigured environments for optimized performance, they trouble
conceptions of performativity. Interfaces are, moreover, not reducible to a single relation with
human users, but are enacted through diverse milieus of hardware and software (Fuller and Cramer,
2008); they are central to the operations of infrastructures and platforms, whilst mediating between
computational systems and non-computational entities broadly speaking (Distelmeyer, 2019). In the
following section, I consider these challenges by positing the interface as the governance of a fluid
Dieter 5

milieu consisting of flows, troughs and turbulence; in doing so, I foreground the significance of
design techniques in the prefiguration of this fluid-like operativity, and consider what this means for
practices and theories of interface critique.
From a media theoretical perspective, the interface is typically considered less a thing or object,
than a dynamic, systematized relation. Over two decades ago, in an exchange for V2_ Institute,
Siegfried Zielinski, 2019 (1997/2019, p. 50) put it this way: ‘[the interface] separates and connects
media-people and media-machines... it is the borderline where the medium takes its shape’. Al-
exander Galloway’s (2012) account of ‘the interface effect’, similarly, describes the generativity of
the interface as a threshold, while Joanna Drucker (2013) calls it ‘a space of affordances and
possibilities structured into organization for use’. In these accounts, there is a sense of dynamic
performativity co-existent with a form of channeling, sequestering or partitioning. Media theories of
the interface, moreover, often take inspiration from the spatial connotations of the term which are
genealogically tied to the control of fluid environments, coinciding with the use of interface as both a
noun and verb (Wirth, 2016). Such deeper associations are charted in Branden Hookway’s (2014)
conception of the interface as a historically distinct form of relating to technology or form of relation
based on a twofold setting of turbulent flow. Here, the 19th century engineer and physicist James
Thomson – who first coined the term ‘interface’ – takes on a prominent role, particularly a key
conceptual image in his investigations of fluid dynamics involving the distribution of unequal
energy between two expansive bodies of water (2014, pp. 67–75). Cast partly as a thought ex-
periment, the scenario involved speculating on the interaction between one completely still body of
water and another which was rapidly moving. Separated by a frictionless barrier, Thomson’s
original theorization of the interface, as Hookway recounts, was centered on the eventfulness that
would suddenly unfold with the removal of this obstacle as a third boundary condition would form
through laminar turbulence; an interaction that was not entirely chaotic, but constitutive of internal
and external pressures arising between the two bodies. As other commentators have observed,
Thomson’s investigation was core to 19th century concepts of dynamic form in industry and natural
philosophy, particularly as they intersected with the development of vortex turbines, electric te-
legraphy and steam engines (Schaefer, 2011). The interface as a concept, accordingly, directly
contributed to understandings of ‘system’ in thermodynamics and shaped discussions of entropy
that would eventually inspire nascent ideas of programmability via the conceptual figure of
Maxwell’s demon (Terranova, 2004). Following this lineage into 20th century information theory
and cybernetics, therefore, the interface can be understood as part of a becoming fluidity of
machines or liquification of media, specifically a transmutation and delimitation of this dynamic
occasion for the extraction of labor. As Melody Jue (2014, p. 92) has recently suggested, these
genealogies suggest a shift from focusing on questions of medium-specificity to the struggle of
being submerged in a milieu-specificity or ‘an aquatic paradigm of informatic “flow” programmed
to influence human behavior’. Where Jue’s contribution enacts a conceptual displacement of
‘terrestrial bias’ in media theory by thinking through seawater, such a turn to the oceanic conversely
also implies a transfiguration of fluid mechanics in the design of interfaces via technical reasoning
and control.
The notion of the fluid-like interface as a form of relation results in convolutions of agency that
require care in applying theories of distributed agencies or entanglement. From actor-network-
theory to agential realism, such thinking influentially comprehends agencies as an achievement of
mutually constituted and contingent configurations of the human and nonhuman. A well-known
contribution of this line of thinking within HCI, for instance, has been to erode away the pre-
sumption of interaction taking place between discrete and self-contained entities – that is, human
and computer – by foregrounding a multiplicity of enacted relations as socio-technical assemblages.
6 Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies 0(0)

Engaging with fluid interfaces, however, I suggest also requires some further consideration of the
deliberate saturation of boundaries and internal dissolution of fixed partitions, alongside the
propagation and dissipation of emergent form. Through prefiguration, testing and modeling, design
techniques seek out points of ‘friction’ or ‘pressures’ to be enlisted into a fluid operativity. The
achievement of an interface within phenomena occurs as both boundary and condition, involving
processes of both separation and fusion. Such agential ambiguity arguably lingers also as a
problematic in ‘the phenomenological matrix’ of so-called third-paradigm HCI (Dourish, 2001),
which might be further explored with Jue’s (2020) suggestion of less ‘grounded’ traditions of
experiential thought from Gaston Bachelard’s reflections on imagination and water to Luce Iri-
garay’s feminist philosophies of fluid dynamics. To complicate matters further, as a system of
augmentation, the fluidity of the interface delivers mixtures of autonomy and constraint that grant
new possibilities of control on an externalized environment. This is something recognized in early
software studies, where Manovich’s genealogy of the split-subject of the ‘dioptric arts’ culminates
with speculative statements on future mobile devices like ‘we will carry our prisons with us - not in
order to blissfully confuse representations and perceptions (as in cinema) - but to always “be in
touch,” always connected, always “plugged-in”’ (2002, p. 113). The interface, in other words,
grants novel capacities for action, but simultaneously blurs its division of the user-as-subject
through a cascading or submersive momentum. The disassociative dynamics of the milieu, in
addition, complicate classical grounds for critique, particularly by obscuring asymmetries that are
constitutive of and perpetuated by these systems, from the extraction of labor to the elevation of
design practice and expertise itself, as Lucy Suchman has notably observed (2007, pp. 268–271).
The significance of these theories can be illustrated with reference to debates around social media
interfaces designed to channel and capture the agency of users. Recalling the McLuhanesque
allegory of a fish oblivious to the surrounding environment of water (Zylinska, 2021), critical
accounts of social media interfaces tend to emphasize how platforms are designed to efface their
logics by heightening immersion toward habitual use and addictive ends (Chun, 2016). Relevant to
these discussions are considerations of how the psychology of flow and other persuasive behavioral
paradigms like captology (aka ‘computers as persuasive technologies’) are embedded into interfaces
(Seaver, 2019; Soderman, 2021). Such frameworks mesh with a broader emphasis on ‘simplicity’
and ‘convenience’ in user experience design through instant sensemaking, immersion and invis-
ibility (Hadler and Irrgang, 2015). Their synthesis results in accelerated currents of activity, what
Silvio Lorusso (2021) calls a ‘speedrun’ aesthetic, that streamlines experience to discourage any
dwelling within the interface, thereby circumventing the potential for inventiveness or poesis. A
parallel can be observed with Natasha Dow Schüll’s (2014, p.175) discussion of ‘perfect con-
tingency’ in machine gambling, whereby the intensified coincidence of action and response draws
players into a ‘machine zone’ or ‘a state in which alterity and agency recede’. This captivating flow
is a predominant disposition of social media (Easterling, 2021), an effect which arises by pro-
gramming and controlling a specific fluid form of relation.
Critical attention has been brought to bear on the processes of subjectivation bound up with this
intensified flow of social media interfaces. As Drucker (2020) notes, social media interface dis-
positions are further exacerbated by the ‘unmarked’ traits of many designed commercial systems,
where elements, layouts and affordances are presented as ‘transparent’ and ‘objective’ to users. In
the terms of STS, they follow the logic of the ‘neutral scientific instrument’ whereby authorship is
erased as a ‘matter of fact’ (Suchman, 2007: p. 214). Drawing from Benveniste’s theories of
enunciation, however, Drucker argues that a dominant outcome of these logics is a system of
speaking where the user is already unknowingly spoken for: ‘the speaker of the system, the “l”
embodied in the design, allows “you” certain choices (and of course, by design and by the mere fact
Dieter 7

of the limits of design, not others)’ (p.109). Artist and critic Lialina (2021), moreover, situates this
slippery self-identification in the history of the web, where the DIY style of ‘my personal webpage’
enabled through open protocols have been subsumed by platform corporations in an enunciative
move toward the social media profile of Me: ‘where My was dangerous, Me was perfect. Me is
cheap, Me is easy to control, Me is easy to channel, Me is slave of its own reflection, Me is a slave of
the platforms that make the reflection glossy. Me is data. Me is data closest to metadata. This makes
Me just perfect to satisfy advertisers and to sate neural networks’. The fluid disposition of the
interface delivers this ‘inherently compromised’ sense of agency whereby subjects become ex-
pressed beyond their will or authorship through an exposure to new forms of experimentation
(Hookway, 2020). As Andersen and Pold (2021) have recently added, users are ‘encased’ like
characters in a ‘big data drama’ that obfuscates distinctions between who is reading and who is
writing, and who is being written and who is being read. In their assessment, this culminates in a user
persona that most closely resembles a zombie, a characterization echoed by the figure of the
sleepwalker (Sampson, 2020). Accelerated dispositions, therefore, pivot on regimes that plot out
patterns of communication on the one hand, while capturing and processing behavioral data on the
other. Critical interface theory, therefore, assists with elucidating the spiral of forces that reproduce,
for instance, the extractive realities of surveillance capitalism (Zuboff, 2019), yet also suggests
particular experiential vorticities that complicates a capacity to establish a solid point of view.
However, despite these agitations of sense and perception, the uncertainties of interfacing should
not be underestimated. From errors and mistakes to internal modes of control that displace forms of
data capture and algorithmic processing, the interface can quickly turn into a zone of struggle and
dispute. In some theories, an emphasis has been placed on the epistemological gap between the
interface interior and exterior as a site of contestation and resistance; for instance, in John Cheney-
Lippold’s re-imagining of the conditional programming statement “else” to conceptualize some
“wiggle room” or respite that ‘offers a possibility for deviance, mobility, and ultimately unin-
corporability according to the conceptual space between algorithms and us’ (2017, p.193). In a
similar way, Olga Goriunova (2019) uses the term distance to negotiate the relationality and
difference between the self and the digital subject as an entity composed by data. In such accounts,
radical contingencies can be mobilized to disturb the realities of testing, modeling and performance.
Indeed, ambiguities and incongruencies are routinely generated with complex machinic systems as
automated mechanisms fail to achieve particular expected symbolic or representational corre-
spondences. Accordingly, while yielding augmentation by submerging the user into a program-
mable milieu – that is, tacit knowledge, embodied skills, new capacities – interfaces as active
thresholds always retain the status of being untimely and affording various modes of evaluation and
critique.
These uncertainties can be further illustrated by returning to the initiation and surfacing of kinetic
form in Hookway’s (2014) genealogy, particularly the external modes of control for designing and
maintaining the interface. Here, the conditions setting up Thomson’s thought experiment on fluid
dynamics are key in the formation of a barrier between the bodies of water and the timing of its
removal. This is an indirect mode of control externally imposed by design as a ‘proximate cause of
the event’ (p. 71). The barrier, accordingly, marks an approximate territory; a prefiguration of the
interface as an event. Through this foreshadowing, moreover, the barrier also conversely signals the
potential of transforming the interface into a surface. Surfacing allows for particular interpretations
and understandings of the activity that takes place within the interface; for instance, through sensing
variations in pressure which are recorded as data, so that ‘aspects of the interface that would only be
available from within the system are here rendered available, at least in part, as a surface knowledge,
to being known from outside that system’ (p. 71). External control can, in other words, surface data
8 Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies 0(0)

from the fluid-like states of the interface via testing for purposes of monitoring and modeling its
performance, yet the output always remains approximate knowledge of internal conditions.
Theories of control that develop around the interface, accordingly, seek ‘to iteratively decrease the
proximate distance between the model, barrier, or surface and the event or interface, so as to control
a system by shaping and influencing the emergence of interfaces within it’ (p. 71). In addition to the
initial partitioning of the barrier – recalling what Karen Barad (2007) described as ‘agential cuts’ –
interface design unfolds over time through recursive arcs of activity like steering and nudging that
strive to coordinate with this gap – what might be described as ‘agential curls’. Fluctuating as kinetic
form, an unfathomable distance nevertheless remains between the external control of an interface
and the experience of augmentation that plays out within.
In what follows, I take cues from such media theories – in particular, milieu-specific analysis and
the becoming fluid of machines – to situate and contextualize modes of interface critique at large.
Since UX can often encourage an ‘aesthetic flattening’ that focuses attention on screens alone
(Diehm and Choi, 2021), these theories are effective in bringing into view the full magnitude of the
interface-as-event along with an understanding of how critique can unfold across four dimensions.
This also means going beyond the user by making inquiries into the infrastructural agencies and
micro-temporal processing of computational media. Within Hookway’s genealogy, prefiguration,
testing and augmentation provide distinct, yet overlapping spatio-temporal orientations toward
interface dispositions. They follow the transposition of fluid dynamics into a programmable system
of control and offer proximate forms of knowledge of an expansive socio-technical milieu. In the
sections that follow, I illustrate these orientations with several examples, laying the foundations for a
different metacritical conception of interface exploitation and domination that highlights traps and
enclosures, mapping convergent interests and the struggle to provide experiential alternatives.

Orientations of interface critique

Diverse modes of interface critique circulate widely throughout digital culture, even if they are not
always recognized as such. Sizing up the interface from different orientations can assist with
situating these modes, including locating cases of reflexive design and software art in relation to
wider ecologies of practice. Importantly, these orientations do not suggest positions of indifference,
but intentional trajectories that follow methods, techniques and tools that support design practice or
design-abilities (Stolterman, et al. 2018). A useful parallel can be drawn with Simondonian-inspired
accounts of software-making, where the expressivity of algorithmic cultural techniques perpetually
concretizes an environment of technicity, which in turn diffuses new transformative individuations
and potentials (Rieder, 2020). Interface design-abilities similarly redistribute agencies with im-
plications that are at once discursive and practical, delimiting voice and authority, while enabling
and constraining action (Cohn et al., 2010). Making use of heterogeneous sources and materials,
design techniques might include graphic arts like sketching wireframes, developing mental models
and personas, working with software development kits, monitoring user metrics or advocating for
new terminology, among others. Studies of interface design practice emphasize trends toward an
adaptive, appropriative use of such techniques in situ, often appearing at odds with the highly
formalized or objective descriptions of methods found in academic domains of HCI. There is, in
other words, a particular tolerance for flexibility in the application of such techniques, influenced by
any number of situated practicalities, which resembles by contrast a conception of design labor as
bricolage (Gray, 2016).
In their ordinary course, however, design-abilities readily correspond with today’s regimes of
UX. The latter is admittedly a somewhat nebulous term at times attached to third-paradigm HCI
Dieter 9

concerns with affect and emotions, non-instrumental understandings of interaction, and situated
contexts of use (Hassenzahl and Tractinsky, 2006), but which has mainly risen to prominence
through a branding of services following an industry-led ‘aestheticization of information tools’
(Manovich, 2012). Figures like Don Norman and Jakob Nielsen (2006), in particular, have pro-
moted UX as a ‘broader concept’ than usability, referring to ‘all aspects of the end-user’s interaction
with the company, its services, and its products’. In this commercial context, design-abilities are
often tasked with the creation of dispositions toward a positive experience of brands supported by an
‘aesthetics of invisibility’ with regard to technology (Masure, 2019). UX can thus be mobilized for
smoothing over or saturating any number of contradictions that might otherwise be experienced
through the interface; reconfirming ‘symbolic forms’ and ‘states of affairs’ to put this in the
language of the sociology of critique (Boltanski, 2011: p. 103). While possibly a topic for another
article, my interest here lies with how UX design-abilities are transformed to unsettle the realities of
such dispositions. This might be considered as moments where those actors caught up with the
design of exploitative and asymmetric systems get a grip on what is happening by turning their
expertise towards critique. Conceptually, it involves a shift from design-abilities that reproduce the
fluidity of interfacing toward a ‘metapragmatic register’ marked by increasing reflexivity toward
these systems along descriptive and normative dimensions (pp. 67–68). Based on prefiguration,
critical diagnostics and augmentation, therefore, I outline a navigational matrix for three orientations
of interface critique, which includes specifying traps and enclosures, surfacing asymmetries and,
finally, augmenting alternatives.

Prefigurative critique: specifying traps and enclosures

Prefiguring an interface involves techniques, tools, diagrams, texts and artifacts that posit a spatio-
temporal approximation of its performance. Like the barrier in Thomson’s thought experiment, they
work to demarcate the position of a potential interface by anticipating forces and pressures that can
give rise to a particular form of relation (Hookway, 2014: p. 148). Such positioning, in other words,
seeks out points of resistance, couplings and conduits of energetic exchange to eventuate inter-
facing, from ‘symbolic handles’ (Fuller and Cramer, 2008) like buttons, sliders and check-boxes –
what Marianne van den Boomen (2014) called ‘depresentational’ icons – to keyboards, controllers
and trackpads as hardware affordances. From a wider infrastructural perspective, protocols, formats
and other technical standards operate as zones of anticipated action for more-than-human forms of
interfacing. Laid into sequences of action, prefiguration takes up models and heuristics to plot
propensities, which themselves draw from past configurations to project future enactments. Pre-
figuration thereby works through recursive patterns that contribute to the stabilization of a fluid-like
interface and its performance. Critical engagements that experimentally explore the material and
cultural significance of such positioning are well-known in media arts, from the bureau-aesthetics of
classic net.art pieces like Alexei Shulgin’s Form Art (1997) to post-digital works such as Aram
Bartholl’s Map (2006–2019), yet such projects are not often considered within wider areas of
relevant critique that similarly interrogate compositional apprehensions.
Reflecting on iterative and changing formats used for positioning, practitioner-based approaches
can readily assist with collectively naming the otherwise unnamed features of everyday interfaces.
The widely used framework of design patterns, for instance, is especially relevant in this context.
First proposed by informational architects Christopher Alexander, Sara Ishikawa and Murray
Silverstein in the 1970s, a design pattern refers to ‘a problem that occurs over and over again in our
environment, and then describes the core of the solution to that problem, in such a way that you can
use this solution a million times over, without ever doing it the same way twice’ (Alexander et al.,
10 Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies 0(0)

1977, p. x). In constrast to earlier proposals for design methods in the 1960s, the notion of patterns
suggested a flexibility in applying already established norms to built environments. Typically
presented as a catalog of entries or library, design patterns follow a format of being individually
named and described with a scenario of use that always requires interpretation and adaptability.
Originally imported into software development through object-oriented programming, before
becoming used in the first Wiki for documenting user interface patterns, the concept’s architectural
links have encouraged a more ‘spatially embodied’ understanding of software development (Alt,
2011). Contributing to the concretization of techniques for software-making, design patterns
foreground modes of regularity and predictability in complex systems and infrastructures (Fuller
and Goffey, 2017). As Galloway (2020) observes, they provide a ‘road map’ for otherwise fea-
tureless systems: ‘design patterns are basically an atlas of digitality as a whole’. Within the context
of user interfaces, in particular, design patterns might assist with identifying arrangements of
information architecture like ‘Feature, Search and Browse’ or ‘Step-By-Step’ navigation flows; they
might alternatively assist with describing layouts of lists like ‘Two-Panel Selector’ or ‘Alpha/
Numeric Scroller’, among others (Tidwell, et al. 2020). Indeed, design patterns can be productively
blended with media theoretical concepts such as affordances or framing to consider recurring
configurations of agency, or connected to larger questions of power as they are enfolded into settings
like secure financial access and exchange (Dieter and Tkacz, 2020).
Within practitioner-based contexts, design patterns have been developed in different directions
for purposes of interface criticism. The term ‘anti-patterns’, for instance, has been coined for
frequently used solutions that inevitably create more problems, particularly when alternative, more
effective approaches already exist (Koenig, 2005). More recently, the designer Harry Brignull has
pushed the framework into the register of critique through the concept of ‘dark patterns’ to describe
the deceptive prefiguration and positioning of interfaces. While tending toward struggles around
consumer rights, dark patterns also invites a consideration of the complex issues that emerge at the
intersection of behavioral economics and interface design, particularly the governmental ambition
to instill conducts that are ‘freely’ embraced, yet deliberately planned and controlled. Other than
providing a taxonomy of deceitful traps, this mode of critique regularly sheds light on areas of
contestation in the concretization of patterns. For instance, such limits are apparent in the promotion
of the ‘forced minimalism’ of corporate flat and material design languages against more singular or
bespoke styles. App interface design, in particular, is positioned by the high degrees of system-
atization in patterns and elements from platform owners like Apple and Google. Indeed, trends
toward automating the implementation of patterns can be observed in the rise of design systems,
which not only represent a further encroachment of control, but additionally exacerbate asym-
metries between front-end and back-end development, or the graphic and engineering domains of
interface positioning. Finally, prefigurative critique might draw attention to restrictions in utilizing
specific design patterns through the power of patents from Apple’s ownership of ‘Slide to Unlock’ to
Facebook’s ‘Like’ or the Microsoft’s Windows startup grid (Tang, 2019). This projective hold
curtails and encloses the potential of patterns in general, since corporations claim ownership over
models that may never be actualized, but are retained to control the innovation space of competitors
and pursue litigation if profitable to do so. With such examples in mind, the critique of prefiguration
it could be said focuses on contradictions that arise through design as a concretization of fore-
thought, opening up areas of ethico-aesthetic inquiry that connects with thinkers of captivation like
Alfred Gell, Vilém Flusser and Peter Sloterdijk (Singleton, 2014). It concentrates on conditions
where actors subtly impose their will through contraptions and new enclosures to exploit anticipated
flows of agency, and suggests in turn a tactics of sensing and cataloguing, or a collective inventory
of plots.
Dieter 11

Critical diagnostics: Surfacing asymmetries

Interfaces are not black boxes with sovereign power inside. As an eventful, programmable and
submersive milieu, the interface is a vortex of agencies, which maintains multiple facings, con-
trasting interior and exterior states, and relational pressures that sustain its threshold condition.
Alongside prefiguration and positioning, there exist a range of tests to evaluate and reinforce the
emergent performance of an interface. This second mode involves critical diagnostics which aims to
surface activity from the event of the interface; that is, it applies tools, techniques and methods to
materialize the fluidity of the interface as a surface that can support close reading or analytics. There
is a notable tension here: while surfaces tend to be associated with interpreting obscure or ‘hidden’
deeper meanings, interfaces complicate this idea through their constitution by bringing diverse
entities into fluid-like relations. As Hookway notes, the interface as a producer of surfaces follows a
particular mode of inquiry which involves maintaining or holding constant specific relations be-
tween entities bound up with this form of relation. In doing so, mutually shaped behaviors can be
steadily inscribed as a surface, but only by recapitulating ‘the binding together of those entities into
relation’ (2014, p.15). Diagnostics, in other words, should not be taken as discovering the essential
properties of the interface as an object, but tracing the interplay between heterogenous, dynamically
related entities. The significance of this distinction becomes immediately apparent when consid-
ering, for instance, the performativity of walkthrough methods, a framework widely used in HCI,
practitioner-based and vernacular modes of interface criticism, and more recently introduced as an
approach in digital media studies. Here, a researcher ‘mimics’ the everyday use of software to render
‘salient’ and ‘visible’ an ‘environment of expected use’ for purposes of critical analysis (Light, et al.,
2018). Although relatively unremarked upon, the involvement of the researcher in these processes
of surfacing suggests a need to develop ‘personas’ when navigating the fluidity of the interface,
especially when dealing with mechanisms of profiling (Dieter, et al., 2019). The submersive
qualities of the interface, moreover, raise interesting challenges in dealing with scenarios of ob-
fuscated algorithmic personalization, idioms of voice, natural gestures and branching conversa-
tional design. In short, any dynamic analysis must grapple with undercurrents of often obscure
socio-technical interactions that mobilize heterogeneous actors and agencies, and at once separate
and augment the operator through the threshold of the interface.
Another side of critical diagnostics, in this respect, opens onto domains of information pro-
cessing, particularly the logistical space of dataflows and micro-temporalities of digital infra-
structures. Intersecting with UX via performance optimization, these design-abilities focus on the
technical timings of interfaces in relation to network connections – or what the media theorist
Wolfgang Ernst (2016) describes as time critical (Zeitkritische) signal processing. From across
global infrastructures, for instance, techno-phenomenological and political economic pressures can
converge on an interface, particularly as loading times are modulated to manage traffic from distant
servers, ad-tech systems and other content-delivery-networks (CDNs), while still rendering such
transactions undetectable to an ordinary user. Poor performance can immediately and dramatically
impact on user conversion and engagement rates, essentially dissipating the submersive flow of the
interface. Here, developer tools to optimize performance become crucial, like waterfall analysis of
calls to application programming interfaces (APIs), the timings of resources being transferred over
networks or how long it takes for images to render. Large repositories like the HTTP Archive,
moreover, host web performance data over time to assist with the identification of trends, key
transformations and exemplary cases of such ‘chrono-design’ over time. Interestingly, surfacing
these machinic processes is only possible in the sense of applying one interface to the operations of
another, recalling sociological discussions of ‘interface methods’ as new techniques are elaborated
12 Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies 0(0)

through the agential ambiguities within this form of relation (Marres and Gerlitz, 2016). A key
illustrative example of how these techniques shift into critique is the recent controversy around
Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP), where the initiative to ostensibly deliver faster mobile
UX was disputed as a corporate incursion into open web standards. Diagnostics, in this case, were
utilized to evidence instances of Google artificially ‘throttling’ the speed of its advertising network
to encourage widespread adoption (Gooding, 2021). Here, critical diagnostics can resemble a kind
of ‘reality testing’ cast into a machinic ensemble of agencies to surface what is and what should not
be (Boltanski, 2011).
Other cases of critical diagnostics can assist with examining asymmetries across ad-tech systems.
For instance, modified optimization techniques support novel forms of critique that surface behavior
between front-end and back-end processes across multiple time-scales to identify elaborate tracking
systems that accompany seemingly retro-lightweight forms of web design (Dieter and Gauthier,
2019). While surfacing cookies and scripts or mapping data transfers are well-established forms of
digital methods, the measurement of micro-temporal dimensions connects to the interface as a fluid-
like form of relation within the political economy of UX. These modes of critique, moreover, are
important since the vortex of agencies environmentally enacted through the interface can at once
blur and obscure the significance of these actors in techno-phenomenological terms. Such ex-
periments can be considered as a contribution to exoteric interfacing, moreover, since the re-
purposing of performance optimization in these ways can play an essential role in the inauguration
of new publics (McKelvey, 2014).

Augmented critique: Inventing alternative experiences

A final orientation based on interface augmentation can briefly be mentioned. Rather than inter-
rogating the performance of an ordinary interface through diagnostics as noted above, critique arises
via design modifications to support the emergence of extraordinary interfaces. This mode arises
through design-abilities like hacking, modding, the development of plugins or other alternative
applications facilitated through software extensibility that alter an expected scenario of use. Ex-
tensibility was first driven by large-scale programming, client customization and the sustainable
evolution of software over time, before gaining further traction with the notion of modularity in
object-oriented programming. Today, it has been thoroughly absorbed into the economic, infra-
structural and governance logics of platforms. Within this context, extensibility enables third-party
software development, while securing proprietary infrastructural resources through g’at the use of
APIs. Indeed, from the perspective of platform economies, this is understood as promoting
generativity through flexible and open affordances that drive the development of platforms and their
interrelations as an ecosystem (Schwarz, 2017). Uncertainty, nevertheless, remains as features, apps
or entirely new platforms are built on top or alongside existing software, even while these processes
also remain highly controlled through multiple dimensions of governance. In this context, aug-
mented critique negotiates and interrogates the social, political and cultural issues attached to
platform power by operating from a secondary or auxiliary stance. From the reality of interface
dispositions, these projects indicate what might be otherwise by letting a world of alternatives flood
in.
Browser extensibility, in particular, is one obvious area where this mode of critique has de-
veloped in a variety of ways. While web platforms have been a major ongoing topic in digital media
studies, browsers have also long existed as platforms; not only in their diverse roles rendering
network protocols and web standards but also as extensible systems branching into heterogeneous
milieux of critical technical practice (Schiller, 2021). After the release of Internet Explorer 4.0 in
Dieter 13

1999, add-ons have been formally supported by major browsers, including through toolbars and
menus, which have supported diverse aberrant expressions. Userscripts, in particular, typically
involving lightweight JavaScript have been supported through managers like Greasemonkey
(2005), or closely related spin-offs such as Tampermonkey (2010) and Violentmonkey (2013).
While appropriated as a source of free labor and innovation, userscripts have been a source of
aberrant critique from automating fake logins for site registration to making visible hidden form
fields utilized for tracking. Ad-blockers, in general, can be understood as originally a kind of
augmented interface critique. Plugin projects like Mozilla’s Lightbeam (2018), first known as
Collusion (2011), are also notable for mapping network trackers in real time with stylistic visu-
alizations. These interventions disrupt undercurrents of datafication, challenging regimes of UX in
service of surveillance capitalism. Other variations include ‘user style sheets’ implemented by the
browser through the rendering of cascading style sheets (CSS) to change the intended appearance of
a site, along with style manager extensions, which have been utilized to support and promote
accessibility, thus disputing the administration of a presumed universal user. Artworks that rely on
plugins to, for instance, perform reductionist aesthetics also make sense when situated in this milieu,
including pieces like Rafaël Rozendaal’s Abstract Browsing (2014) or Ben Grosser’s Facebook
Demetricator (2012) which leverage ‘code to investigate and critique code… to ask “what if we had
a different script?”’ (O’Dwyer, 2021). At its most inventive, therefore, augmented critique opens up
an existential challenge to UX by shaking users out of their habits, and interestingly re-establishes
both reflexive design and software art within a collective milieu of evolving practices suggestive of a
tinkering critical technical republic (Harwood, 2019). Predictably, this kind of extensibility has also
come under considerable scrutiny due to its subversive potential. Consider ‘script kiddies’, for
instance, as a derogatory term referring to the apparent dangerous accessibility of augmented
programs. It is telling that with the ascendency of the platform economy, modes of augmented
critique have become increasingly reigned in and tightly policed.

Conclusion
Starting from Agre’s original proposal of CTP and its various influences, this article has ultimately
sought to track down and make a case for interface critique at large. Taking a media theoretical
approach, I have suggested that such cases are not often recognized together due to the difficulties
comprehending the interface as a fluid-like milieu or vortex of heterogeneous agencies. In response,
I have sketched out a navigational matrix of three orientations based on – prefiguration, diagnostics
and augmentation, and illustrated how modes of critique operate uniquely within these zones. My
brief discussion here has tended to focus on interface design-abilities for apps, platforms and the
web; no doubt this could be taken further through different examples or refined via empirical
research into these modes of critique, including the circulation and reception of their apparent
achievements. Nevertheless, I want to emphasize that they offer invaluable, under-appreciated
resources for furthering critical knowledge and pursuing progressive ends regarding often esoteric,
yet everyday technical subjects. Alongside software art and reflexive design, they exemplify an
inventive search for new criteria for critique and, in so doing, provide means to construct new
metacritical theories and common capacities from within conditions of saturated immanence.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or
publication of this article.
14 Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies 0(0)

Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD
Michael Dieter  https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5894-7892

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