Signals #005: Where the Seams Are

One of the more interesting moves in the writing about AI right now — visible across pieces from designers, researchers, and a critic of computers — is the rediscovery of the seam. For most of the last decade, the dominant design instinct around digital technology has been to remove seams. Frictionless onboarding. Seamless transitions. The disappearance of the off-switch. Each removal was sold as an improvement, and each one made some sense in isolation. The aggregate effect, which has only recently become visible, is that the surfaces of our digital lives no longer have any joints — no places to step back, no places where the system declares itself a system rather than a wraparound layer of life. AI is now intensifying this dynamic, and the writers below are beginning to argue with it. What they are arguing, from different angles, is that seams are not failures of design but the deliberate architecture of a working relationship. A productive collaboration with an AI requires explicit…