Design is What You Don't See
July 18, 2025
Reflections on Karen Nakamura's Surface Tension and the politics of invisibility in design
In her project Surface Tension, Karen Nakamura placed prosthetic arms, hearing aids, glucose monitors, and other personal medical devices into a gallery space — not to showcase technology, but to provoke a reaction. They sat on pedestals, connected to air pumps. Every few minutes, they twitched, clicked, inflated, or emitted a low mechanical buzz.
There was no explanatory text.
No interactive screen.
No invitation to empathize.
Just the eerie tension of tools moving without users. Bodies implied but not present.
It was one of the most powerful critiques of human-centered design I've ever seen.
Who Is the Interface For?
Surface Tension isn't about disability in a didactic way. It's about interdependency, systems, and the technopolitics of daily life. The gallery installation becomes a space where design is dislocated from its user — and that absence is the point.
It forces us to ask:
- Who gets to be invisible in tech?
- Whose tools are always visible?
- What does it mean to be "autonomous" when your survival depends on designed systems?
This isn't speculative fiction. This is lived infrastructure. And Nakamura invites us to sit in that discomfort, not resolve it.
Against Empathy
What I admire most is that this piece doesn't ask for pity or even understanding. It doesn't perform accessibility. It doesn't explain itself.
It simply exists — twitching, buzzing, reminding — in a space that is uncomfortable precisely because it breaks the traditional design loop of "need > use > resolution."
This is critical design that withholds resolution — not out of cruelty, but out of respect. It's a refusal to reduce a complex lived reality into a digestible design prompt. That's radical.
What Designers Can Learn
Surface Tension doesn't teach us how to make better products.
It teaches us to interrogate the systems in which products make people legible or illegible.
It asks us to design with, not just for — and to do so slowly, respectfully, and with a greater sensitivity to what remains unsaid.
It also challenges the way we treat accessibility as a feature, instead of a perspective. Accessibility isn't about checking contrast ratios or adding alt text — it's about understanding that design always carries assumptions about what bodies do, what minds process, and what tools should stay hidden.
Where I Carry This Work
Karen Nakamura's work continues to inform how I think about AI design, music interfaces, and systems that scaffold learning. Her work reminds me that a good product is not always a smooth one. Sometimes it's the glitch, the click, or the delay that tells the real story.
In a world rushing to make everything seamless, Surface Tension teaches me that design should sometimes linger, resist, or even refuse to explain itself — because not everything should be optimized. Some things should simply be witnessed.
"Not everything should be optimized. Some things should simply be witnessed."