Windows, Frames, and Other Realities
Through the lens of a child’s camera, decades of interface design, and thousands of years of wondering.
My daughter has discovered the joy of photography through a clever little child’s digital camera. She’s particularly fascinated by its ability to overlay different frames and effects onto the scenes she captures — digital embellishments that transform ordinary moments into something more magical. She wanders our home now, periodically stopping to frame a shot, gleefully experimenting with different overlays before saving or printing her creations. I watch her exploring these layered realities, and I think about the frames through which we all view the world.
As a designer, I’ve spent decades crafting interfaces — digital frames through which people perceive and interact with information. Each screen, each viewport, each carefully considered interaction creates a contained space, a bounded reality. But lately I’ve been wondering if these digital frames are just echoes of something more fundamental about human experience itself.
The ancient Indian concept of Maya suggests that what we perceive as reality is itself a kind of interface — a veil or illusion that both reveals and conceals a deeper truth. This view deepens when we consider reincarnation, central to Hindu and Buddhist traditions, as a kind of cosmic scenario engine where souls cycle through different roles and relationships, each life a new frame through which to experience existence. Modern discussions of simulation theory propose something surprisingly similar, though clothed in technological metaphor: that our reality might be a kind of program, running on some cosmic computer. Whether we’re living in a simulation, experiencing Maya, or cycling through incarnations, all these perspectives suggest we’re viewing existence through frames, inhabiting contained spaces that shape and limit what we can perceive.
I think about this when I observe how my daughter’s camera changes her relationship with space. When she looks through its viewfinder, adding layers and frames to the world she sees, she’s simultaneously here and elsewhere — physically present in our living room but perceptually engaged in the act of transforming reality. Isn’t this similar to how we all move through life? Our consciousness frames reality in particular ways, creating the boundaries that define our experience.
The interfaces I design are really just another layer of framing, another way of containing and shaping human attention. The best ones acknowledge this role — they don’t try to be reality itself, but rather serve as thoughtful windows onto it. Perhaps this is why I’ve always been drawn to designs that embrace their nature as frames rather than attempting to create seamless illusions.
There’s something liberating about recognizing the frames we inhabit. Just like my daughter can, we can learn by playing with them, shifting our perspective, and remembering that what we see is always partial, always framed. In doing so, we might find more grace in navigating between the various layers of reality we inhabit — from the physical to the digital, from the apparent to the profound.
Written by Christopher Butler on
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