Review of Transparent Designs: Personal Computing and the Politics of User-Friendliness, by Michael L. Black

The book follows an intricate history of computing that hinges its thesis on the to a history of the word ‘transparency’ as a method in the field of engineering that is meant to make invisible what is otherwise always working within a computer. For the author, rendering computation as transparent reveals the inherent politics of the notion of user-friendliness. The contribution that Black makes to the field of the history of computing is tracing the principle of transparency to a pre-history of the graphical user interface. The question that this book comes back to over and again remains: how can the design ideals that constitute the user-friendly interactions between humans and computers be subverted? The book helps the reader to see what has otherwise been designed to be hidden. In revealing to the reader how the principles baked into our everyday use of computers can at least be traced to what has been framed as a user-friendly past, we are able to move towards an intervention that would constitute, as Black puts it, “an unfriendly future.”