Transparent Designs

Transparent Designs is a cultural history of the personal computer. Its central argument is that user-friendly design lets technology companies build systems that most of us cannot really understand. Modern computers are easy to use, and their welcoming interfaces suggest they exist for our own benefit, yet those interfaces seldom prompt us to ask how our everyday use serves the wider political and economic strategies of the people who designed them.

Michael L. Black goes back to the early debates in hobbyist newsletters, computing magazines, user manuals and advertisements about how ordinary people could come to see personal computers as usable and useful. He looks at how machines from the Tandy TRS-80 and Commodore PET to the IBM PC and Apple Macintosh were sold to an American public that was excited by the promise of the computing revolution but doubtful about its own place in it.

Through this archival work, Black shows that many founding principles of usability theory grew out of disputes over programming languages and business strategies shaped by that public doubt. He widens the idea of usability to include the popular and technical rhetoric that sets users' expectations of what counts as usable and useful, which he argues matters as much as hardware and software interfaces, or more. Looking at the first decade of personal computing, the book shows how usability has repeatedly been used to paper over the gap between how computing is talked about and how it is actually experienced. It also asks what follows from a computing culture that assumes the average person need not know how the machines they rely on work inside.

The book will interest readers of vintage computing, the history of technology, digital rhetoric and American culture.