Windows and Mirrors

Transparency is everything in interface design. Perhaps not everything but it's majority of everything. Designers want the users to look through the interface and really experience it. They want the magic codes and operating systems to be hidden. Transparency isn't the only way we could work though. The Wooden Mirror was a good example of how opaque designs could be. I think that we do take technology for granted and we don't really understand how much controlling it takes to even spell check your essay. I have a love-hate relationship with GPS systems and how slow they are and how they keep "recalculating". One time I was getting frustrated with it for being so slow and my friend reminded me that this little piece of metal is sending data to outer space (millions of miles away from where we are), into a satellite (rotating somewhere around the earth), and sending it back to us at this exact location. Pretty amazing. I, of course, stopped complaining after this. The point is, making technology invisible to us allows us to fully experience the systems but it makes us unaware of all the effort put into giving us what we need.