- Interfaces in The Stack 1: The Aesthetics of Logistics
Because interfacial grids within The Stack compose lines that both subdivide and gather, even at the same time, and because these framings localize interactions within a global platform, they can control the distribution of bits, objects, and affects according to those curves. Within this context, the effectiveness of the GUI is not limited to simple relays but also depends on other physical interfaces in the landscape. A contemporary interfacial regime includes all manner of gates and switches, both large and small, adding up to a vast distribution of circuits: anatomical sensations, screen-based icons, chips and sensors, software protocols, buildings and roads, airport terminals, warehouses and continental shipping ports, transoceanic supply chains, open and closed production cycles, forensic analytics, geographically particular store shelves, individuated instances of consumption, and so on. Any particular interfacial regime is itself one among the many that compete to design The Stack, and while each provides a particular (perhaps totalizing) logistical imaginary for the Interface layer, it in no way exhausts its design horizon.
Interfacial regimes focus all mediation onto and into key switch points, but like any other media, they are not only conduits of information; they also produce information by translating and relaying it from there to here. Interfaces work as machines, and machines work as interfaces, and so in the wider interfacial landscape, many specific technologies are not isolated mechanisms put to work for isolated goals; they are also technologies for the production of other technologies. A car is produced by assembly line robots, which are produced by other machines, which are produced by other machines, all operating in relations of mutual production (it is technology turtles all the way down). In this contemporary logistics, the procedural chains of productive and consumptive succession pass from one machine to another and one interface point to another. The interfaciality of each level is of course designed toward particular ends, even if the entire chain is not really knowable or viewable as one big whole from any one point. For The Stack, increasingly intense computational intelligence is designed into specific nodes in this chain, and sometimes without knowledge or control of other interfaces that may directly or indirectly link to it. Despite this, or perhaps because of it, we should then define interface design not only as the specification of one given node (such as the GUI for an App) but also as the design of the succession of relays through an intended pathway of connections. It is a programming of multiple interfaces in spatial and temporal sequence, potentially spanning ideation and production to distribution to consumption to recycling and recapture. With this expanded brief, interface design (combining tool, icon, space, service, interaction, organization, and so on) encompasses the design of objects and surfaces and the systems that enable other Users to put their own programs in motion, as well as the programming of the processes whereby all these things may assemble or disassemble according to plan. By this perspective, the potential interfaciality of any single node (virtual or physical) could be thought of as equal to the cumulative interfaciality of all the processes that it can put in motion toward some resulting assemblage, however permanent or temporary. This is first-order interface design: the design of chains of interfacial effect by means of physical and virtual relay networks (and it clearly has much in common with platform design but focuses on designing the exact mediations as its essential problematic). <sup>29</sup>
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Interface Layer