Design and Digital Interfaces: Surface Depth

Are digital interfaces controlling more than we realise? Can designers take responsibility, and should they?

From domestic appliances like Siri and Amazon Echo, to large scale Facebook manipulation and Google search prediction, digital interfaces are ubiquitous in everyday life and their influences affect how people live, feel and behave. As they grow in complexity and increase integration into our lives we need to address the social, ethical, political and aesthetic responsibilities of those designing and creating the computer systems all around us.

Through discussion with cutting-edge designers and thinkers and with international examples, the authors explain how we need an expanded aesthetic, critical and ethical awareness on the part of designers willing to act with sensitivity and understanding towards the people they design for and with.

This critical take on the process and implications of interface design looks beyond the mechanics of making, and into the techno-political realm of deliberate and unintended consequences.

Ben Stopher is Programme Director: Interactive & Visual Communication at the London College of Communication, University of the Arts London. He has extensive experience as a practitioner and creative consultant in communication and digital design. As a researcher he is interested in how global digital culture shapes design practice and his PhD research (at the Royal College of Art) explores models of distributed and augmented ideation through speculative prototypes and user research.

John Fass has been a designer and art director for fifteen years working in photography, information architecture, user experience design, interaction design and design research. His photography and design work has been published worldwide. Research areas have covered personal informatics, design theory, behaviour scripting, slow technology, social interaction design, and narrative construction. He is course leader for Information and Interface Design at London College of Communication, and PhD Researcher, visiting tutor, Information Experience Design, Royal College of Art, London.

Tobias Revell holds a BA in Design for Interaction and Moving Image from the London College of Communication and an MA in Design Interactions at the Royal College of Art from which he graduated in July 2012. As well as being an internationally exhibiting artist, and tutor in Interaction Design Arts he is a founding member of research consultancy Strange Telemetry. He is one of the course leaders for BA Information & Interface Design at the London College of Communication.

Dr Eva Verhoeven is interested in the consequences of technological developments and its relays into society and culture and the question of the role of the designer within it. She holds a Masters degree in Interactive Media: Critical Theory and Practise from Goldsmiths College and was awarded her PhD in Digital Creative Practice from Wimbledon School of Art/University of Surrey in 2009. She is Course Leader of MA Interaction Design Communication at the London College of Communication