Interfaces have agency: what an anthropology of art taught me about UI

We like to say an interface is "just a layer." A thin skin over the real system, there to get out of the way.

I don't think that's true. Before I wrote code, I studied social anthropology, and one idea from that world changed how I look at every screen I build: objects act on people. Not metaphorically. They make us do things, feel things and assume things about whoever made them.

Interfaces are objects. So they act too.

Gell in two minutes

In Art and Agency (1998), the anthropologist Alfred Gell stopped asking "is this beautiful?" and started asking "what does this object do in a web of social relations?"

His answer: objects carry agency. Not because a shield or a carving has a mind, but because people treat it as an extension of someone's intention, and respond accordingly. A carved prow on a canoe was meant to dazzle and unsettle the people on the receiving end. It worked on them before anyone said a word.

Gell described four roles in that relationship:

• Artist: whoever made the object
• Index: the object itself, the thing you can see and touch
• Prototype: what the object represents or refers to
• Recipient: whoever encounters it

Any of them can be the agent (the one acting) or the patient (the one acted upon), and the roles keep switching.

The part that matters most for us is what Gell, borrowing from Peirce, called abduction: when people meet an object, they infer the intention behind it. We look at a thing and immediately guess what someone wanted from us.

Now map that onto a product team:

Once I saw it this way, I couldn't unsee it.

Three interfaces, seen as objects with agency

1. The car cluster that competes with the road

For three years I built pre-prototyping tools for vehicle interfaces. A cluster is the clearest case of an interface with agency I know.

A warning light doesn't inform the driver. It demands something: a glance, a decision, sometimes fear. It pulls attention away from the road for a second or two, and that second is a design decision someone made.

The prototype matters too. The low-fuel icon is a gas pump that many younger drivers have never seen as a standalone object. It works because the cultural reference survived, not because it is self-evident. Change the culture, or the reference, and the icon stops acting the way you intended.

And the recipient acts back. Drivers learn which alerts they can ignore. Once they do, the interface has lost its agency, often for good. That's not a user error. That's the relationship working exactly as Gell would predict.

2. The payment button that tells you what it wants

Now I work on a QR payments network, where every screen sits between someone and their money.

Consider two buttons: "Pay now" and "Continue." Same function. Different agency. One is honest about the consequence; the other hides it behind a softer verb. Pre-select the installment option, make the full-payment option smaller, and you've designed a nudge.

This is where abduction bites. Users read intention into these choices immediately. They don't think "the button is blue." They think "this app wants me to take credit." Whatever you meant, the inference they make is the relationship. Trust is built or burned right there, in a label.

3. The activation flow that blames the user, or the brand

Imagine activating a new phone line on a cheap Android device, on a weak network, as someone who rarely fills out forms online. That's the reality for millions of people buying a prepaid SIM at the supermarket.

When a step times out, the screen doesn't say "the network is slow." It says "something went wrong, try again." The user doesn't infer a technical failure. They infer intent: they don't want people like me to make this work. Agency gets attributed to the brand, not to the infrastructure.

Same code, same bug. But the meaning of the bug depends entirely on who is on the other side of the screen.

What changes when you build with this in mind

I don't think you need to read Gell to ship good software. But thinking of interfaces as agents changed four habits for me.

1. I ask what the interface makes people do, not what it shows.
Before a PR, I try to name the action each screen pushes toward. If I can't name it, the screen probably pushes toward several things at once, and users will pick the wrong one.

2. I design for abduction.
People will infer an intention whether you give them one or not. So I make the right inference easy: verbs that say what will happen, honest defaults, error messages that say whose fault it is. "The network is slow, your data is saved" earns more trust than "Something went wrong."

3. I treat workarounds as data.
The recipient is also an agent. When people screenshot a QR instead of scanning it, tape over a warning light or keep a paper note next to an app, they're acting back on the interface. Those workarounds tell you where your object stopped working. I'd rather instrument them than ignore them.

4. I ask who is left out of the relationship.
Agency only works on people who can perceive the object. If the contrast fails in direct sunlight, or the flow assumes a fast phone and a full data plan, some recipients never enter the relationship at all. Accessibility isn't a checklist on top. It decides who the interface is allowed to act on.

The layer isn't thin

An interface is never neutral. It carries the intentions of the people who made it, imitates references from a specific culture, and gets read, bent and judged by the people who use it.

We can pretend it's "just a layer," or we can design the relationship on purpose.

This piece started as an essay on aesthetics and communication I wrote for my master's in Digital Humanities. It took me a while to notice I was describing my day job.

What's an interface you use every day that clearly "wants" something from you? I'd love to read your examples in the comments.

References

Gell, Alfred. Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998.