Paris, B. & Cornelius, K.B. Affecting the Interface.

This project promotes digital literacy of common principles of website design infrastructure that aid interfaces as the contemporary intermediaries for framing and structuring human affective capacities of sensation and cognition, engendering performative encounters with technologies and the informational sphere to which they allow access. We draw primarily from Johanna Drucker’s (2009, 2013) argument that the design of an interface acts as the catalyst for probabilistic readings, what she calls “performative events,” that produce a type of constrained play limited by the affordances and calculable outcomes that come from conventional design.

Our intention is not just to inculcate users with knowledge, but also allow users to sense knowledge and experience information affectively through an interface prototype that incorporates our theoretical argument in its design.

Our prototype performs this task by answering the following questions:

• What would a browser ‘add on’ look like that would expose the principles we are looking at?
• What might an ‘affectively informed’ interface necessarily incorporate?