Computers as Theatre
Source: https://www.pearson.com/en-us/subject-catalog/p/computers-as-theatre/P200000003468 ↗
Brenda Laurel's central thesis is that Aristotle's Poetics — not cognitive psychology, not engineering — provides the best framework for designing human-computer interaction.
She treats every software experience as a dramatic structure with agents, action, and audience engagement, arguing that the quality of an interface depends on the same principles that make theatre compelling: enactment, not description.
The book appeared at a moment when HCI was dominated by task-analysis models and productivity metrics, and it opened an entirely different vocabulary for thinking about what software does to people emotionally and narratively.
Most of what circulates today under "experience design" or "design thinking" descends from arguments Laurel made here, usually without acknowledgment and with the philosophical depth removed.
Reading the original restores what the popularizations lost.
Central argument
Laurel argues that Aristotle's Poetics — specifically its account of dramatic structure, agency, and enactment — is a more powerful framework for designing human-computer interaction than the task-analysis and cognitive models that dominated HCI in 1991. She treats software experiences as theatrical events with agents, action, and emotional arc, where the interface's quality is measured by the same criteria that make drama compelling: not whether it describes a task efficiently, but whether it enacts something that engages the person fully. The key claim is that 'enactment' — doing, not describing — is the constitutive principle of good interaction design.
Critique
Laurel's theatrical model presupposes a relatively unified, authored experience with a designer functioning as playwright and a user functioning as audience-participant — a premise that strains considerably when applied to platforms, APIs, or systems where the 'drama' emerges from millions of unscripted user interactions rather than a composed dramatic arc. The Aristotelian framework also privileges narrative coherence and emotional resolution in ways that may romanticize friction-reduction and obscure legitimate cases where opacity, incompleteness, or user-controlled chaos produce better outcomes. There is a tension between the model's humanism and its implicit auteurism: it risks repositioning the designer as the author of experience rather than the architect of conditions for user agency.
Why it matters for product
CPOs setting a product vision often inherit a team fluent in conversion metrics and task-completion rates but without vocabulary for evaluating whether an experience is dramatically coherent — whether it builds toward something, whether it gives users a sense of meaningful agency rather than just efficiency. Laurel's framework gives product leaders a principled basis for challenging purely quantitative success criteria: a flow can score well on task metrics and still feel inert because it has no arc, no stakes, no enactment. That distinction is particularly sharp when directing 0-to-1 work, where the question is not 'does it work' but 'does it matter to the person inside it.'