The Image-Interface

3Practicing Image-Interfaces

This chapter adopts a pragmatic perspective towards image-interfaces: it studies how image-interfaces are practiced. While the last chapter helped to identify the foundations of visual and graphical information, the current chapter has the purpose of observing the different manners in which those elements are put together, notably through software applications. This chapter is organized into different categories according to practices of imaging, for example, image editing, parametric design, and also writing and web environments. As long as we talk about image-interfaces, our concern is not only the result of some software manipulation, but also the graphical elements that accompany the user to achieve such transformations. That is one of the reasons why writing and data science environments are considered (they introduce imaginative forms that treat text as image together with the corresponding graphical interface elements).

In a similar manner in which film makers and directors spend great amounts of time watching films, image-interface designers use, test, install and hack different varieties of software applications. This chapter tries to provide a practical basis before venturing into prototyping our own image-interfaces.

3.1. Mise-en-interface

This chapter can be seen as a continuation of the generative trajectory introduced in section 2.1. In this respect, our last discussion on the materiality of visual information observes the screen and ...