Since the democratization of computer technologies in the 1980s, the desktop metaphor has become one of the main incubators for the developing paradigm of graphical user interfaces. Retrospectively, we can observe the transition between various models, such as Skeuomorphism or Flat Design that, although based on different graphic concepts, share the objective of corresponding the expectations and needs of the user. Referring to a diversity of aspects, such as usability or attractiveness, user interface design is concerned with the surface and appearance of the interface, as a major component of the interaction with computational devices and of the overall use experience.
Thus, interface design is also a way of conceptualizing the user; a way of imagining users in their plurality and reduce them to a pattern. As Olia Lialina says, “Users are the figment of the imagination. As a result of their fictive construction, they continued to be re-imagined and re-invented through the 70s, 80s, 90s, and the new millennium”.
Designing Experiences: Imagining Users seeks to illustrate changes in user interface design paradigms. The website is developed around an allusion to the desktop metaphor, associated with personal productivity and the ‘work environment’. The user navigates the web page and observes changes in the graphical interface that, gradually, opens up to an increasing level of personalization.
With this experience, the project seeks to evoke how the characteristics of the interface are indicative of the way the user is conceptualized, as someone busy, intelligent, naive, initiated, specialized, among other attributes frequently mentioned in a, openly, user-centered design process.
