"Beautiful Seams": Strategic Revelations and Concealments
Abstract
This paper tracks a debate that occurred, first, within the field of Ubiquitous Computing but quickly spread to CHI and beyond, in which design scholars argued that seamlessness had long been an implicit and privileged design virtue, often at the expense of seamfulness. Seamless design emphasizes clarity, simplicity, ease of use, and consistency to facilitate technological interaction. Seamful design emphasizes configurability, user appropriation, and revelation of complexity, ambiguity or inconsistency. Here we review these literatures together and argue that, rather than rival approaches, seamful and seamless design are complements, each emphasizing different aspects of downstream user agency. Ultimately, we situate this debate within the larger, perennial discussion about the strategic revelation and concealment of human and technological operations, and therein the role of design.
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Productive friction reveals epistemic limits of what the AI and the clinician can know about a case, unlike seamful design.
“And unlike seamful design (Chalmers 2003;Inman and Ribes 2019), which reveals infrastructural boundaries, productive friction reveals epistemic ones, the limits of what the AI (and the clinician) can know about a given case.”
From From Oracles to Productive Friction: Designing for Meaningful Human Oversight in Clinical AI (2026) · cites this paper as Inman and Ribes 2019
Cites
The Computer for the 21st Century
Weiser, M. (1991) · Scientific American · doi:10.1038/scientificamerican0991-94 · Cited by 10,017 · see citing works
Tangible bits: towards seamless interfaces between people, bits and atoms
Ishii, H., & Ullmer, B. (1997) · Proceedings of the ACM SIGCHI Conference on Human factors in computing systems · doi:10.1145/258549.258715 · Cited by 3,853 · cited 1× · see citing works
“the digital and physical seamlessly extended the digital realm by taking advantage of “natural physical affordances to achieve a heightened legibility and seamlessness of interaction between people and information” [28].”
BackgroundSteps toward an ecology of infrastructure: Design and access for large information spaces
Star, S. L., & Ruhleder, K. (1996) · Information Systems Research · doi:10.1287/isre.7.1.111 · Cited by 3,238 · see citing works
Ambiguity as a resource for design
Gaver, W. W., Beaver, J., & Benford, S. (2003) · Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems · doi:10.1145/642611.642653 · Cited by 1,348 · cited 3× · see citing works
“Arguing that ambiguity (or uncertainty) can be a resource for design, Gaver et al. [20] showed that while ambiguity may appear to be antithetical to usability, ambiguity and uncertainty are in fact part of achieving usability.”
BackgroundInfluentialStaying open to interpretation
Sengers, P., & Gaver, B. (2006) · Proceedings of the 6th conference on Designing Interactive systems · doi:10.1145/1142405.1142422 · Cited by 592 · cited 1× · see citing works
“For example, Sengers and Gaver [42] argue that seamful designs “explicitly represent the limitations and uncertainties in data, allowing users to make up their own minds about how to interpret it.””
BackgroundPreist, C., Schien, D., & Blevis, E. (2016) · Proceedings of the 2016 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems · doi:10.1145/2858036.2858378 · Cited by 133 · see citing works
The Stuff of Bits: An Essay on the Materialities of Information
Dourish, P. (2017) · doi:10.7551/mitpress/10999.001.0001 · Cited by 132 · see citing works
From Margins to Seams: Imbrication, Inclusion, and Torque in the Aadhaar Identification Project
Singh, R., & Jackson, S. J. (2017) · Proceedings of the 2017 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems · doi:10.1145/3025453.3025910 · Cited by 72 · see citing works
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Why Johnny Can’t Prompt: How Non-AI Experts Try (and Fail) to Design LLM Prompts
Zamfirescu-Pereira, J. D., Wong, R. Y., Hartmann, B., & Yang, Q. (2023) · Proceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems · doi:10.1145/3544548.3581388 · Cited by 893 · see citing works
The Metacognitive Demands and Opportunities of Generative AI
Tankelevitch, L., Kewenig, V., Simkute, A., Scott, A. E., Sarkar, A., Sellen, A., & Rintel, S. (2024) · Proceedings of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems · doi:10.1145/3613904.3642902 · Cited by 280 · see citing works
How does HCI Understand Human Agency and Autonomy?
Bennett, D., Metatla, O., Roudaut, A., & Mekler, E. D. (2023) · Proceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems · doi:10.1145/3544548.3580651 · Cited by 111 · see citing works
Beyond Intrinsic Motivation: The Role of Autonomous Motivation in User Experience
Bennett, D., & Mekler, E. D. (2024) · ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction · doi:10.1145/3689044 · Cited by 37 · see citing works
Beyond Behaviorist Representational Harms: A Plan for Measurement and Mitigation
Chien, J., & Danks, D. (2024) · The 2024 ACM Conference on Fairness Accountability and Transparency · doi:10.1145/3630106.3658946 · Cited by 22 · see citing works
“In addition, if the user had not continued on to ask about who is and isn’t represented in the responses, the harms after the first interaction (associating soccer stars as male) might be increased.”
BackgroundExplainability Pitfalls: Beyond Dark Patterns in Explainable AI
Ehsan, U., & Riedl, M. O. (2021) · arXiv · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2109.12480 · Cited by 99 · see citing works
From Oracles to Productive Friction: Designing for Meaningful Human Oversight in Clinical AI
Rubegni, E., Natali, C., Valsecchi, C., Rizzo, S., Ayoub, O., & Facchini, A. (2026) · Proceedings of the AAAI/ACM Conference on AI, Ethics, and Society · doi:10.1609/aies.v9i3.43300
- Authors
- Inman, S., & Ribes, D.
- Affiliations
- University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA
- Venue
- Proceedings of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
- Publisher
- ACM
- Published
- 2019-05-02
- Pages
- 1-14
- Cited by
- 81
- References
- 8
- Funders
- Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation (5549)
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