Glossary from the Loop
Design terms for systems, signals, bodies, and behaviors (Updated as the loop evolves.)
We’re already entangled with our tools.
Signal+Static explores design not just as craft, but as system negotiation. Between the learned, the speculative, the embodied, and the technological. It believes we are cyborgs, and might need to extend our linguistic apparatus with self-aware terminology.
This glossary is a living document of terms that emerge across essays, field notes, and moments where design meets interface friction. Expect semi-regular updates and redefinitions.
It will evolve. And loop.
Glossary
Terms from the essay Pilot Mode
Trained Loop Fidelity
The internalized rhythm of a user’s feedback loop. Disrupt it—even with “better” design—and you introduce lag. A high-functioning system must preserve muscle memory and scanning patterns.
Situational Compression
The shrinking of time and cognition into a single, high-stakes moment. In mission-critical environments, every interface decision has to resolve in milliseconds. UX must operate at the speed of trained instinct.
Language Drift
What happens when established UI symbols are redesigned without deep context. It looks cleaner. It feels clever. But it fractures fluency. It’s the equivalent of swapping verbs in a native tongue.
Reprogramming
The hidden cost of learning something new. Every novel UI interaction is a behavioral intervention. Reprogramming is thrilling _if_ you’ve got the time and attention. But it’s always a tax.
Cyborg Design
Design that operates inside the user’s extended nervous system. Less about novelty—more about harmonizing with embodied loops. You’re not building tools. You’re building extensions of self.
Interface Fluency
The invisible language of a system a user already knows. Not just what symbols mean—but where they live, how they behave, and what they feel like under pressure.
Behavioral Intervention
Any interface that deliberately slows the user down to encourage reflection, redirection, or retraining. Used intentionally, it’s a moment of transformation. Used accidentally, it’s breakage.
Terms from Luke’s Hand: Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep
Empathy Prosthesis
A technological tool or system that enables, enhances, or simulates empathetic experience. In Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, devices like the empathy box become not just aids but gatekeepers to emotional connection.
Bright Line Fallacy
The mistaken belief in a clear and absolute division between human and machine. A rigid boundary that feels satisfying to draw, yet dissolves upon closer examination of lived experience.
Systemic Empathy
A codified and institutionalized measure of empathy, often displayed, tracked, or enforced as part of a social or political system.
Networked Dreaming
The shared creation of identity, experience, or vision through interconnected human and technological systems, where boundaries between self and machine blur into collective imagination.
Prosthetic Removal Paradox
The question of whether connections, capacities, or feelings augmented by technological extensions will endure once those extensions are taken away, and what their absence reveals about the human baseline.
Think a term belongs here?
Drop a comment, reply, or @ me with a signal you’re tracking.
This glossary lives and breathes through use.
That's a great idea! Thanks for the inspiration.