By what criteria should we judge our interfaces? If the interface medium is indeed headed toward the breadth and complexity of genuine art, then we are going to need new language to describe it, a new critical vocabulary. Some of this language will rise up sui generis out of the new technologies, but most of it will borrow extensively from preexisting traditions: art and architecture, the cinema and novel. Certain digital revolutionaries will see this pilfering from the past as a limitation, the telltale sign of a thinker still trapped in the analog world of the past. But the truth is, radical breakthroughs are anomalies in the cultural fossil record. The interplay between past and future forms drives the creative process more than it impedes it. Interface designers have much to learn from the invention of the Renaissance perspective, or the buildings of Frank Gehry, and interface critics have much to learn from the interprative schools that have developed around those older movements. We need a new language to describe the new medium of interface, but that doesn’t mean we can’t borrow some of our terminology from the forms that have come before it.
— Steven Johnson. Interface Culture.San Francisco: HarperEdge, 1997. page 18.
