1001 A CULTURAL APPROACH TO INTERACTION DESIGN

When Janet Murray speaks of interaction/interactive design as a cultural practice, I start thinking about the word 'artifact' and how odd and heavy it feels when paired with the word 'digital'. An artifact by its origin is something unearthed. A remnant almost. I see it as a physical trace of human intent and labor that is weathered by time, somehow always in a museum setting. To call something digital an artifact is to grant it a kind of material dignity, to acknowledge that even in the invisible realm of code, there’s still craft and human gesture. Interaction/interactive design is not purely technical, it is narrative and ideological. So maybe digital artifacts are not just interfaces we click through, but cultural sediments and sites where behavior, intention and computation condense into form. I think the word artifact has this connotation of time, a slow and historical one. It resists the pace of the digital. When we say “digital product”, we imply utility and speed and consumption. But “digital artifact” becomes something that needs to be interpreted in a way that suggests longevity in a medium defined by constant updates and obsolescence. Murray’s text makes me consider how every digital creation, whether an app, a website, or a piece of generative art, embeds a worldview.

To think of our screens (generally spesking) as artifact spaces is to realize that the digital is not ephemeral after all. It accumulates and remembers, sometimes even scars. However, I am still hesitating to treat interaction/interactive design as a kind of 'artifact'. I would consider it a narrative architecture, especially one that shapes how we perceive and move through the world. Nonetheless, the “digital artifact” then becomes a vessel that is half tool half text through which human expression is both encoded and read. Its material is not clay or stone but attention, data, and senses.