John Pavlus argues in Technology Review that, contrary to the vision of Google Glass and designers who imagine being able to automatically trigger actions by just doing unobtrusive ordinary stuff– taking a picture by looking at a thing for longer than a second, or recording a voice message by touching your tongue to two teeth– “Your Body Does Not Want to be an Interface:”

These designers think that the difference between effortless tongue-flicking and Glass’s crude chin-snapping is simply one of refinement. I’m not so sure. To me they both seem equally alienating–I don’t think we want our bodies to be UIs.

The assumption driving these kinds of design speculations is that if you embed the interface–the control surface for a technology–into our own bodily envelope, that interface will “disappear”: the technology will cease to be a separate “thing” and simply become part of that envelope. The trouble is that unlike technology, your body isn’t something you “interface” with in the first place. You’re not a little homunculus “in” your body, “driving” it around, looking out Terminator-style “through” your eyes. Your body isn’t a tool for delivering your experience: it is your experience. Merging the body with a technological control surface doesn’t magically transform the act of manipulating that surface into bodily experience. I’m not a cyborg (yet) so I can’t be sure, but I suspect the effect is more the opposite: alienating you from the direct bodily experiences you already have by turning them into technological interfaces to be manipulated. 

I’m as big a fan of tools that disappear, of the pleasures that come from concentrating hard on a game or riding a bike as anyone can be; and I think Pavlus makes a great point here. As he notes, this something that Heidegger talked about (and which HCI people have been elaborating for years, thanks mainly to Paul Dourish’s use of Heidegger). Heidegger distinguished between

technology that “gets out of the way” and technology that becomes an object of attention unto itself. Heidegger’s concept of “ready to hand” describes a tool that, when used, feels like an extension of yourself that you “act through”. When you drive a nail with a hammer, you feel as though you are acting directly on the nail, not “asking” the hammer to do something for you. In contrast, “present at hand” describes a tool that, in use, causes you to “bump up against some aspect of its nature that makes you focus on it as an entity,” as Matt Webb of BERG writes. Most technological “interfaces”–models that represent abstract information and mediate our manipulation of it–are “present at hand” almost by definition, at least at first. As Webb notes, most of us are familiar enough with a computer mouse by now that it is more like a hammer–“ready to hand”–than an interface standing “between” us and our actions. Still, a mouse is also like a hammer in that it is something separate-from-you that you can pick up and set down with your hands. What if the “mouse” wasn’t a thing at all, but rather–as in the Fjord example of “staring to select”–an integrated aspect of your embodied, phenomenal experience?

In that case, your own body–your own unmediated, direct experience–would (could?) become “present at hand”: a control surface, an object, not-you, “in between” your intent and your action. You’d be “operating” aspects of your own embodied experience as if it were a technology.

So what starts out as an effort to create technologies that are intimate and easy to use leads to a distracting self-awareness of even your ordinary bodily activity.

If this seems a bit abstract, think about how self-conscious you would be if some ordinary activity accidentally triggered an action. This video about Google Glass is a great illustration of how such interfaces could make walking down the street dangerous:

Think this is unlikely? Think about how many times people write an email that’s meant for private consumption, that has something confidential or insulting or otherwise utterly mortifying or embarrassing and inappropriate, then hit “Reply All.”

Now imagine that you could do this by, say, shaking your hand at the wrong time. Awesome.