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Interface Anthropology
“I am me and my circumstance, and if I don't save her, I don't save myself”.
Frivolising the maxim of José Ortega y Gaset, An interface is a small circumstance, a two-dimensional space in which we project ourselves and through which we have to move. An environment that, like our culture, habitual residence and social environment, conditions our spirit.
All this nonsense comes to mind, as I've been re-reading some passages from “..." lately.“Anthropology of the landscape. Climates, cultures and religions”a book by Tetsuro Watsuji that I discovered four years ago thanks to a post by Juanjo Seixas.
In this essay, Watsuji categorises human nature according to its climatic environment.
According to Watsuji, there are certain climatic characteristics that determine the self and our relationship with nature: acceptance y submission in monsoon areas, where natural forces are so violent - and at the same time life-giving - that they make any kind of opposition impossible; or fight in desert areas, where, in order to live, man has to fight and face the threat of other men in order to survive; or domain on nature, as in the in-between areas where we live.
Interestingly, these types of attitudes are the same ones we find in many users with respect to interfaces, in fact our job is none other than to transform the user's acceptance, submission and/or struggle into mastery.
As interaction designers, we are very fortunate to work with an environment that is usually flexible and malleable. But this is not always the case. Often there are “geographical accidents” that are impossible to overcome and that condition our work: be they called technological constraints, call yourself social organisations, call yourself lack of requirements e previous information.
It is delusional to think that the interaction designer or usability expert will always manage to reshape the entire landscape of a website or application like a god. The margin for action is not always total and the world cannot be saved with 4 post-its.
Sometimes we have no choice but to make the user's life more bearable with palliative cures, in the form of contextual aids or fragmenting processes. Other times we can act as osteopaths, correcting the interface's deviations and postural maladjustments, even though we know that the user will soon return to bad habits as soon as we abandon the project.
In any case, without taking my ramblings too seriously, I recommend Watsuji's book, it will give you a lot of inspiring information about human nature and the imperturbable circumstances that surround us.