Johanna Drucker’s Reading Interface unfolds interface not as a window or tool but as a space of encounter, both literal and conceptual. I find this notion of boundary space crucial—where one doesn’t merely look “at” or “through” a surface, but enters into an interrelation of perception, cognition, and design. Reading her history of control boards, command lines, and GUIs, I imagine the early panels—thick with toggles and circuits—as physical architectures of thought, rooms of switches one must walk through to program meaning. In comparison, today’s smooth screens compress that spatial labor into gestures, clicks, glides. Yet the spatiality persists, only internalized—our eyes and hands move across virtual topographies, guided by symbolic cues.
Drucker writes that interface is a “constitutive boundary space,” where we are formed as subjects rather than simply users. I think of the “enter” key, or the scrolling motion of a trackpad, as invitations to pass thresholds. The GUI is a stage that stages us—our cognition choreographed through hierarchies, windows, and metaphors of folders or desktops. When I “walk into” a screen, I sense this double architecture: one of physical proximity (my body facing glass, my finger tapping) and one of metaphoric immersion, the illusion of spatial continuity inside.
In design, this awareness of space can become productive. Subtle delays, gradients of light, or spatial sound could guide perception inward, echoing the tactile depth of analog control panels. Layers might unfold like corridors—interfaces that invite movement, not just selection. Drucker’s “constitutive” reading reminds us that every interface scripts behavior. To “walk in” becomes not immersion into illusion, but participation in the shaping of space itself.