"Intelligent" Interfaces

• In Event: Innovating, Interrupting & Regenerating the Human-Technology Frontier - II

Abstract

This presentation focuses on the design and engineering of “intelligent” interfaces. Traditionally, interface design has foregrounded vision as the primary sense through which people interact with computing interfaces. Newer, “intelligent” interfaces aim to incorporate a broader range of sensory modalities, feedback mechanisms, and paradigms for interaction. A growing variety of computing interfaces are being developed for tasting, smelling, hearing, touching, and feeling, in addition to seeing. This expansion of the definition of “the interface,” in tandem with the development and emergence of “intelligent” devices, warrants further investigation by STS scholars. How do recent developments in “intelligent” interfaces fit into or complicate longstanding science studies conversations about embodiment and knowledge relationships, or ongoing technology studies conversations about human-machine interactions and relationships? “Intelligent” interfaces, as this presentation highlights, promote new kinds of dialogues between people’s bodies and networked machines, along with new forms of bodywide computing. This presentation will focus on recent examples of “intelligent” interfaces from realms of biomedicine, education, and urban planning to illustrate broader trends in “intelligent” interface design and engineering. In doing so, the presentation will examine how ideas of the body come to be mobilized within “intelligent” interface development communities—tracing the ways in which intelligent interface design and engineering and theories of bodies mutually inform each other through bidirectional, yet still asymmetrical, interactions. The larger argument put forth is that “intelligent” interfaces are a provocative new set of physical theories and models of the body circulating publicly, not just another trend in information technology and hardware development.

Author

• Brian Kinnee, Human Centered Design & Engineering (HCDE), University of Washington