Transparent Designs: Personal Computing and the Politics of User-Friendliness by Michael Black

Abstract

Reviewed by: Transparent Designs: Personal Computing and the Politics of User-Friendliness by Michael Black Luke Fernandez (bio) Transparent Designs: Personal Computing and the Politics of User-Friendliness By Michael Black. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2022. Pp. 280. Michael Black begins Transparent Designs by describing Steve Jobs's design philosophy for Apple. In 1984, Jobs explained that the company aspired "to reach the point where the operating system is totally transparent. When you use a Lisa or a Macintosh. … You never interact with it; you don't know about it." Black uses this anecdote (and many others like it) to illustrate the idea of transparent design and how it is hyped. [End Page 618] For its advocates, the complexities of the computer should be erased, to the point of becoming invisible. They believe simplifying the interface creates more user-friendly experiences. Black argues that these conceptions of transparent design and user-friendliness, which emerged in the early 1980s, were hyped by corporate tech evangelists (like Jobs) as well as by tech journalists who wrote for computer magazines like BYTE. As Black suggests, resonances of this rhetoric were also manifest among academic researchers and human-computer interaction scholars. Black is suspicious of this design-talk. He suggests that transparent design conceals as much as it reveals and allows designers to hide their own intents behind the guise of user-friendly interfaces, giving the impression that the user's interests are paramount. Yet in hiding so many functional aspects of the computer, accountability is compromised, enabling designers to pursue their own invisible ends. Citing Safiya Noble, Black mentions how search engines present themselves as neutral tools. But under the cover of simple interfaces, they are being tweaked in the service of surveillance capitalism. Black proposes to lift or pull back "the veil of transparency" (pp. 25, 225, 229, 230) and usher in a new approach to design that will unmask the way technology serves to distribute power between designers and users and within society as a whole. Transparent Designs ends with a coda titled "Imagining an Unfriendly Future." At times the coda reads like a manifesto, touting the need for a more capacious and politically inflected understanding of what user-friendliness and transparency should mean. In spite of the ending, though, Transparent Designs is primarily a history. It traces the origins of transparent design and how it developed as a reaction to 1970s hobbyist computing, which preached an ethos of self-reliance and invited tinkering. Many readers may already be aware of how Apple, IBM's PC, and the counterculture jockeyed to cast themselves as antiauthoritarian while labeling their rivals as authoritarian. But "transparent design" is a novel lens through which to tell these stories. Black works in an English department, and it is interesting to see the tropes that scholars in this discipline use to make sense of interfaces. Black approvingly quotes Lori Emerson (an English professor at the University of Colorado) who talks of the interface as a "magician's cape, continually revealing … and concealing as it reveals." I suspect that it has not occurred to most technology scholars to use veils, or the irony they invoke, to make sense of their subject matter. Black makes effective use of these tropes in his history. Provocative as it is to think of transparency as something that actually conceals, I do wish that Black had spent additional time exploring more conventional usages of the term. For example, for those of us who grew up in the 1970s, it was common to run across clear plastic models of V8 engines and of human bodies, revealing rather than concealing complexity. Analogous forms of transparency are also available in open-source code repositories and the organizations that support those repos. Open-source [End Page 619] codes invite users to tinker and to consider how the code distributes power between its developer and users. These are transparent designs in a more conventional mold that actually aspire to reveal technological complexity and the politics inherent in that complexity. Black mentions open-source evangelists but does not give their conception of transparency much weight because he thinks the movement has been coopted. It is also curious that...