Semiotic Foundations of HCI and UX Design - Cross-Cultural Human-Computer Interaction and User Experience Design - page 22

As we implied above, UIs are intersubjective media. Winograd and Flores (1987,
p. 169) support this by saying, that “by producing tools we design new conversations
and new relations.” Therefore, the things for use mediate human relationships. And
on this level signs (i.e., elements of representation) are also created (Schutz, 1973,
p. 148). The design thus sets forth human relations. In a lot of cases this is done
with a certain goal, as it is in social web projects, such as Facebook. It must be clear,
however, that in most cases this is done inadvertently. Here, the agent is no more the
designer, but the system of codification and medialization, determined by technical
devices, above which the creator has no power any longer. What is important here is
that the ideology perpetuates itself beyond the human reach.
Programmers aren't the important elements for the functioning of techno-images, but the
structures of apparatuses they produce. Techno-images are imperativistic not because
they are used by some ideologists to manipulate the society, but because they are a
projection of such a pixel universe, that pretends to present the world pixel by pixel. For
this imperativistic, “imperialistic” nature of techno-images not the human being, but an
artificial plotter, artificial intelligence, automatism of apparatuses is in charge, and has
become independent from the human.
(Flusser, 1995)
In the above quote, what is imperativistic is the constructed artificial world that
forces us to take it for reality. What is imperialistic is the tendency of the producers (or
even the producing automata of techno-images themselves) to colonize the semiotic
space with signs (techno-images) referring to other techno-images and leaving out
all the rest. Such a tendency is supported by a number of ideologies embedded in the
UI.
What are then the emerging HCI ideologies present in the UI? In the field of UI
design, different instances of ideology are present. So far, one of the most prominent
is the ideology of hypertext (Bush, 1945). As Nielsen states, “[hypertext] makes
individual users the masters of the content and lets them access and manipulate it in
any way they please” (Nielsen, 2004). This user-empowering approach is contrasted
by choice-obfuscation (e.g., when navigation links are not readily visible) or even user
oppression (when user choice is limited or eliminated, e.g., in splash screens or ads)
(Ibid.). Currently, the semantic space of UI ideology is somewhat centered around
the terms “simple, fast, intuitive, social, minimal, choice, useful, fun,” as a series of
interviews with web designers suggest (Chang, 2006). Relating to the understanding
presented above, perhaps the leading ideologies are: the semantic web, Open Source
movement, the hacker ethic (Levy, 1984) and Wikipedia, all of which follow the
empowering principle.
Another important ideology is the ideology of ease. Dilger (2000) presents the
ideology of ease, which dissects users into the “computer illiterate” and “techies” and
suggests that this “will ensure that the historical boundaries of gender, race and class
are reproduced in computing practices for years to come.” By ideologies, he means the
“frameworks of thinking and calculation about the world—the 'ideas' that people use
to figure out how the social world works, what their place is in it, and what they ought
to do” (according to Dilger's reading of Hall, 1985). It is important to mention that
in the same manner HCI/UX practices reproduce also cultural, and age boundaries,