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Interface Fantasies And Futures: Designing Human-Computer Relations In The Shadow Of Memex, Rachael Bradshaw Sullivan

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation is about how designers, experimental writers, and innovative thinkers have imagined both computer interfaces and the human/machine relations that might emerge through engagement with different kinds of interfaces. Although futuristic thinking about digital media and their interfaces has changed over time, we can isolate some constants that have persisted through almost all mainstream practices of interface design, particularly in American culture. Drawing from a historical trajectory that I associate with Vannevar Bush and his speculative invention, which he called “memex” in a 1945 essay, I name these constants sterilization and compartmentalization. They are two tendencies or values that …