English 212: Writing, Rhetoric & Interface Design

Indeed, Aristotle's 2,000-year-old definition of rhetoric still applies today. As a result, designers who understand the rhetorical nature of the interfaces they create will be better equipped to make educated design decisions.

(Wendy Winn and Kati Beck "The Persuasive Power of Design Elements")

rhetorical theory is the driving force in the design (of sites).

(Wendy Winn and Kati Beck "The Persuasive Power of Design Elements")

We have reached a point where the various media evolve so rapidly that the inventors and the practitioners have blurred into one holistic unit, like a science lab hosting a creative-writing seminar. There are no artists working in the interface medium who are not, in one way or another, engineers as well. This has always been the case with culture and technology, of course; it's just that we used to pretend it was otherwise, by dutifully keeping the painters and the mechanics separate, on the college campuses, in the museum halls, on the bookshelves....The artisans of interface culture don't bother wasting time with these arbitrary divisions. Their medium reinvents itself too quickly for false oppositions between creative types and programmers. They have become something else, some new fusion of artist and engineer -interfacers, cyberpunks, Web masters - charged with the epic task of representing our digital machines, making sense of information in its raw form (Johnson 7).

The location of visual elements in the UI has a huge impact on how the user interprets information.
Rick Oppedisan, 2002

True interactivity is not about clicking on icons or downloading files, it’s about encouraging communication.
Ed Scholssberg, 2002

By creating a new interface between the self, the other, and the world beyond, media technologies become part of the self, the other, and the world beyond. They form the building blocks, and even in some sense the foundation, for what we now increasingly think of as 'the social construction of reality' (Erik Davis Techgnosis 4).

I’ve been amazed at how often those outside the discipline of design assume that what designers do is decoration. Good design is problem solving.
Jeffery Veen, 2000