Computers as Theatre

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.