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  • Interfacing by Iconic Metaphors
  • Marianne van den Boomen (bio)

Interface: What You See Is What You Get?

Operating a computer is quite easy nowadays. We all click our way through our desktops, we all know how to open our e-mail, how to save files in folders. Working with computers has become such a common practice that we barely realize how these actions are framed by metaphors. Our first association with “cleaning a desk-top” has probably more to do with deleting unused icons and files than with polishing a work-table surface. Behind our personal computer we are all disciplined office workers.1 Yet, while most operating metaphors are drawn from an office setting, we have no problem when they blend with metaphors from other settings, such as home, play, menu, or window.

Reading these metaphorical signs—no matter whether they come as words or pictures—and using them as tools usually goes on seamlessly: “what you see is what you get.” But, as we all know, sometimes things go wrong. Sometimes the sign/tools on our screen do not yield the expected results. Then the machine closes itself for us as users, and suddenly exposes its status as a black box—an opaque, unknown machinery between input and output.

In this article, I aim to track down what exactly happens when we are reading/operating a computer, and how metaphors enable or disable our access to black boxes. First, I introduce some basic [End Page 33] notions about user interfaces and the way they organize and sometimes disorganize our access to our computer. Second, I undertake a close reading of computer icons as signs, and confront this with their functioning as tools. Third, I address icons as conceptual metaphors, and material metaphors. I conclude with an argument for a material semiotics, which is able to provide an account of the sign–tool–machine oscillation at work on our desktops.

A Computer Is No Coffee Machine

Any machine that can be operated by humans in variable modes comes with a so-called user interface: a specific arrangement of switches, buttons, and other operating tools. This mediating switchboard provides operational access to the machine, whether it be a dashboard, steering wheel, and pedals in the case of a car, the buttons for cappuccino or espresso on a coffee machine, or the keyboard and mouse by which we operate our PC.

All machines do their job by physically transforming energy and/ or raw material into some product, effect, or event. While this also holds true for the computer, this machine does more. On top of its physical transformations (changes in the state of the electronic circuits inside), it stores machine readable representations of these states in computer memory, and translates parts of these into human readable symbols on the screen. This is what makes the computer special: it is both a physical-processing machine and a symbol-processing machine.

The exchange between the physical and the symbolical is accomplished by the common language of digitality, as the electronic circuit states and the human readable signs can both be translated into digital code.2 Digital code embodies specific instructions (programs) for the machine, enabling it to load, read, and write entities in its memory. In order to enable humans to read specific parts of this memory, the computer needs a sophisticated device: a screen that shows both output and input in human readable form.

The screen displays visual representations of the inner state of our computer, ordered by pictorial icons, textual menus, and plane subscreens (windows)—the so-called graphical user interface (GUI). The displayed graphics may function as buttons to give commands to the machine. This is comparable with the pedals in a car, as with [End Page 34] a desktop icon for starting your e-mail program or toolbar icons for commands such as “save” or “print.” They also may be feedback signs, indicators of how the machine is working—comparable with the speed display in a car, as with an taskbar icon indicating your are connected to the Internet. They also may, as a composite of signs, display a product—comparable to a delivered cappuccino by a coffee machine...

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