Abstract
As artificial intelligence increasingly takes over the designer’s role in shaping interfaces for services and platforms, a key challenge is how to teach young designers to critically reflect on how design mechanisms shape users and their everyday lives. Interface Cultures, Forever was a design workshop that challenged the conventional notion of the digital interface. Participants were asked to design critical interfaces - concepts that reveal tensions, paradoxes, and invisible mechanisms within digital life. Through speculative and ironic prototypes, students explored how interfaces shape behavior, emotion, and identity. The projects articulate a landscape of cultural critique, where the interface becomes both medium and message: from bodily automatism and sensory addiction to algorithmic control, mediated self-representation, temporal anxiety, and digital silence. Each prototype employs strategies of parody, over-performance, and inversion of norms, thus repositioning interface design as an act of commentary - an inquiry into the conditions of human experience within contemporary techno-social systems.
Keywords
interaction design education; speculative prototyping; critical interface design;
DOI
https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2026.1750
Citation
Ciaramitaro, M., and Costa, P. (2026) Interface Cultures, Forever: speculative prototypes for technological awareness, in Simeone, L., Gray, C. M., Verhoeven, A., de Götzen, A., Bakırlıoğlu, Y., Zohar, H., Stead, M., and Buwert, P. (eds.), DRS2026: Edinburgh, 8–12 June, Edinburgh, United Kingdom. https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2026.1750
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Included in
Interface Cultures, Forever: speculative prototypes for technological awareness
As artificial intelligence increasingly takes over the designer’s role in shaping interfaces for services and platforms, a key challenge is how to teach young designers to critically reflect on how design mechanisms shape users and their everyday lives. Interface Cultures, Forever was a design workshop that challenged the conventional notion of the digital interface. Participants were asked to design critical interfaces - concepts that reveal tensions, paradoxes, and invisible mechanisms within digital life. Through speculative and ironic prototypes, students explored how interfaces shape behavior, emotion, and identity. The projects articulate a landscape of cultural critique, where the interface becomes both medium and message: from bodily automatism and sensory addiction to algorithmic control, mediated self-representation, temporal anxiety, and digital silence. Each prototype employs strategies of parody, over-performance, and inversion of norms, thus repositioning interface design as an act of commentary - an inquiry into the conditions of human experience within contemporary techno-social systems.