The Human Body Is the Interface

In the interaction design fields, we have often considered the interface a tool between the human body and another entity, regardless of whether the entity is another living organism, an object, a machine, or a system. In the Italian context I have trained in, the form of the inter- face has been – for many years – a topic of discussion that has seen different points of view but now more than ever, this design context – understood as a control instrument for something external to our body – is dissolving and vanishing into the artifacts, just like the concept of machine or computer is slowly becoming physically and culturally invisible. Sebastiano Bagnara and Simone Pozzi had already envisaged this moment of transformation in the past, but the reflection I present today as a conclusion of a years-long research path leads me to claim that the design discussion on the body has returned to the front stage, and the artifacts we identify in our sector as interfaces are gradually integrating with the same. This design scenario is not a recent event but has already been the subject of multiple experimentations in art and media studies in the past. The exhaustingly quoted claim by Marshall McLuhan, who stated that even media may be considered an extension of man, helps us understand how relationship and communication tools may be a single entity composed of mind, body, and interface. About this position, considering the contemporary technological debate and keeping in mind that most adults in the more developed countries daily use a smartphone to communicate and connect to the web, it is fair to claim that such devices are also extensions of our bodies we cannot do without if we wish to relate to the system we live in. This symbiosis in the communication system becomes evident from the moment we culturally hooked up to the web and its services that sped up long-distance communication and demanded a part of our brain to focus on such devices. To assert the above, I believe it is necessary to review – through several analyses – some of the innovation processes emerging in the past few years in the Human Body Design context, defining as a problematic field the technological implications that growingly contaminate the artifacts and the forms of interaction that humans may adopt in using them. In this reasoning, it is not simple to set a limit and classify the designs currently identified as wearable devices, but it is important to consider how these may be, first of all, the result of a gradual size reduction of existing objects external to the boundaries of the body. We may, instead, identify a second class of designs born, in relation to the human and the body itself and configured as prostheses. This second kind of object is a quite promising design path in which innovation processes are forming new scenarios where the body may integrate daily and harmonically with such instruments.