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the illusory TRANSPARENCY OF INTERFACES

Carlos Scolari

1. The dawn of digital humanity
The January 24, 1984 born Macintosh, a digital machine with a graphical interface and mouse, easy to use or, as it was called then, a computer friendly interface. Steve Jobs and Steve WOZNIAC, two young computer digital micro grown in that proposed a new line of computers that stood out for its compact form (similar to an appliance), using mouse the built-in floppy disk drive and a graphical interface based on the metaphor of the desktop (desktop).
In the mid 1980's, digital interfaces, after 20 years of life in the computer labs, became visible. The interfaces were there, in all homes and offices, to reach (just click the mouse to feel part of one's body). 90
In the desktop metaphor was extended to all industrial sectors, from accounting to administrative offices and studies mechanical and architectural design.

1.2 The invisible friend
whole philosophy of User-Centered Design ( User-Centered Design ), which is in Don Norman one of its main promoters , revolves around this idea: that the user can concentrate on your work machine should be removed and do away with the interface. Thus, in a few years, the principle that affirms the need for transparency of interfaces became one of the great maxims of the design world. The desire for a transparent interface requires the user to concentrate on the action of communicating and not the devices that make possible the exchange. Both researchers
interaction as user interface designers, programmers and psychologists agree on one point: The best interface is the interface that is not felt. The reader will progress in reading without taking into account the object-book or devices that facilitate navigation within the structure.
From now try to demonstrate that even the simplest example of interaction with digital machines, such as clicking a button or move a document to the trash, hides an intricate web of semiotic and cognitive processes.
interface like any other place where semiotic processes are verified, is never neutral or naive.

1.3 Towards a semi-cognitive
Why a model semi-cognitive human-computer interaction? Semiotics is not enough to theorize audiovisual texts. A semiotics of digital interactions is required to open the game to other theories and other fields of scientific knowledge. In our case, we approach to cognitive theory, which for more than 20 years studying human-computer relationship. Both
cognitive semiotics Charles Peirce, the tradition of Hjelmslev, the model of the human-machine interaction proposed by Bettetini or investigations by Clarisse S. De Souza from the theory of codes Umberto Eco, offer useful elements to guide the development of a semiotics of interaction. This latest research, De Souza-regarded as artifacts of interactive systems that form a sort of exchange between designers and users. The interfaces, in this sense, are considered "artifacts metacomunicacionales."
Anyway, we are not interested to propose guidelines or advice for the design of good interactions. " We believe that only a reading in contractual interpretation and interaction processes enable us to overcome this instrumentalism in current theories of human-computer interaction, as we have seen, consider the interface a simple extension or prosthesis of the body and the interaction naturaly activity automatically. It is, in short, to overcome the myth of transparency of the interfaces, showing the complex semiotic devices that lie behind the apparent automaticity of the interaction.

The second chapter of his book, explaining what Scolari is an interface. Below is a summary of that part of his work.