New interfaces for a post-pandemic world

Spanish version: Nuevas interfaces para un mundo postpandemia

Most of the interfaces in which we participate are showing their obsolescence and inability to adapt to the brutal transformation caused by the COVID-19. If, as I wrote in The Laws of the Interface (2018), an interface is a network of human, institutional and technological actors that maintains a series of relationships, then it is becoming more than clear that these networks barely withstand the onslaught of an implacable reality . We are in the same situation that Jesús Martín-Barbero mentioned on the first page of his classic From media to mediations (1987):

It has not been only the limitations of the hegemonic model that have forced us to change paradigms; it has been the stubborn facts and the acute social processes of Latin America that have changed the objects of study for communication researchers.

Once again, the “stubborn facts” are leading us to question our concepts, theories and models of analysis. This text is dedicated to some interfaces that began to show their limitations before the pandemic and now, in the face of the viral tsunami, they have had to take an accelerated course in adaptation to manage change.

Educational interfaces

It seems that in short the school we have known during the last two centuries, that industrial line of knowledge (re)production, will be replaced by an experience where small groups will alternate in the classroom to develop practical work and comment on content they have seen before online on a platform. Although experts in educational innovation have been proposing “learning by doing” and “project work” for decades, in the end it was a microscopic and deadly virus that accelerated this transition.

Like any other process of change, also in this case countless conflicts and tensions will have to be faced. If something was clear during the first weeks of quarantine, it is that none of the actors in the educational interface was prepared to face the challenge: ministries and schools without contingency plans, teachers who did not know how to manage a videoconference, homes with low connectivity, parents who had to dedicate themselves to home teaching while teleworking, etc. The digital divide emerged in a brutal way.

The redesign of the educational interface at all levels, from kindergarten to university, must start from the traumatic experience we have lived in 2020. Much remains to be done: we are moving towards a blended educational system where activities will develop both in the classroom and on different platforms. Perhaps the opposition between classroom education versus online education will cease to make sense in a few years. In this article published by the CCCB you will find more reflections on educational interfaces.

Work interfaces

As they included places to eat, coffee machines and, with a bit of luck, some privileged people like Don Draper (Mad Men) could even take a nap, during the 20th century offices went from being an extension of factories to becoming extensions of the home. If the industrial revolution moved the workforce from the countryside to the assembly line, the service revolution moved them from the factory to the offices. In 1956 William Whyte, author of The Organization Man, defined the employee as “someone who had left home, both spiritually and physically.”

In recent years, corporations on the US West Coast took this substitution to its last consequences, making their offices the “first home” of the digital workforce (Google as a paradigm of the new cool multitasking work environment). COVID-19 is changing this conception of work environments. These days the big digital corporations are betting on telecommuting and the Financial Times even talks about “the rise and fall of the office”. As we have just seen with respect to education, it is very likely that certain areas of administrative work will also go towards a mixed regime where telework alternates with specific moments in the offices.

In the article “COVID-19: Is this what the office of the future will look like?” published by the World Economic Forum several possible scenarios are anticipated, from the creation of virtual workstations to the identification of “exclusion zones” around each desktop. The doubts and uncertainties, once again, are not few: how far will the desire to monitor the workforce not end up generating remote control devices that would make Frederick Taylor pale? What will happen to the mythologized co-working spaces, designed precisely for the close interaction of the subjects? After all, the unbreathable and claustrophobic offices of the past (the “cube” that Nikil Saval described in Cubed: A Secret History of the Workplace) are perhaps the most aseptic and safest place in times of pandemic …

Cultural interfaces

By “cultural interfaces” I understand different networks of actors whose main function is the distribution of goods and the performance of artistic and cultural activities in the broadest sense, from libraries to cinemas, bookstores and museums. All these interfaces were designed a couple of centuries ago (cinema a little later) to respond to certain needs of society such as democratic access to knowledge, the consolidation of a national story in the arts, the prestige of large capitals, etc. Like schools, libraries and bookstores have for years suffered from the loss of centrality of the printed book in educational and cultural processes. Beyond the threatening presence of Amazon, COVID-19 had to come for many bookstores to get on their feet and organize online sales and home distribution systems. The redesign of these book-centered spaces is imperative if they wish to survive in the new media ecology.

With regard to museums, in recent decades large institutions have opted for the organization of overcrowded events of planetary impact such as the Leonardo da Vinci exhibition at the Louvre. The confinement imposed by COVID-19 meant a blow to the great museums. According to Miguel Falomir, director of the El Prado museum, it is estimated that the losses due to the fall in ticket sales reach two million euros per month. As soon as it closed its doors on March 12, the museum increased its online presence to reach more than 12 million visits in less than two months (+ 232% compared to the same period of the previous year). It should be noted that El Prado had already been exploring new ways to present its collection, for example inviting the Italian artist Rino Stefano Tagliafierro to animate their paintings (check the video!).

In The Laws of the Interface (2018) I proposed the following principle: “interfaces do not extinguish, they transform” (6th Law). This law is obviously inspired by one of Marshall McLuhan’s aphorisms (“The content of a new media is an old media”). This means that the new interfaces will retrieve actors or sets of actors from the previous interfaces. The return of the drive-in movie, a classic mass culture space of the mid-20th century, is a good example of these recovery processes. These open-air spaces could be used to screen not only feature films but also to host live shows without putting the health of the audience at risk.

In short: cinemas and museums, as well as educational interfaces, will have to overcome the opposition between offline and online in order to consider a hybrid model for managing their processes and assets.

Another world, new interfaces

This text could go on for pages and pages. Many interfaces designed for industrial society must be redesigned. Institutions born in Modernity, such as parliaments and political parties, are also part of that list. COVID-19 revealed the limitations of the representation and decision-making systems. Even if I am not interested in opening a controversy, I am almost convinced that certain decisions — such as the confinement of some areas of the territory during the pandemic — would have been more successful in the hands of an artificial intelligence fed with good data (not all AI is an evil Skynet that wants to eliminate us…).

But let’s not get off the subject: political interfaces, such as educational or cultural ones, must also be redesigned and adapted to a society very different from the one that gave birth to them. And when we talk about redesigning political interfaces, we are not just referring to mounting a wall with screens inside a parliament: it is about rethinking the interface actors, relationships and processes in a radical way. None of the interfaces mentioned so far, be they educational, cultural, work or political, will change simply by incorporating a technological (digital?) actor to the network. The important thing is to transform relationships and processes. Sometimes, technological actors can be of help but, in general, they are not as important as we usually believe.

Note

More information about an interface-centred approach in this series of posts about the Laws of the Interface.