Mode-Bending: A Desktop Exploration

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For my reinvention of the “What’s in my Bag?” assignment, I chose to explore my desktop interface as a digital counterpart to the physical bag. Rather than a still image representing physical objects, my redesign provides a live, narrated exploration of the tools and technologies that shape my daily life. By incorporating auditory aspects into the visual mode with a dynamic approach, I want to reveal how meaning changes when representation is lived and interactive rather than static. This approach also felt far more personal. My desktop, much more than any physical bag, reflects who I am and how I navigate the world. While the contents of my bag may represent fixed necessities, my desktop is lived in and ever-changing, comprised of practicalities and constants as well as new projects, creative outlets, and memories. It is a site of continual revision. It exposes the overlap between my identities as an AuDHD woman, student, wife, creator and artist, and functions both as a workspace and autobiography. Since I spend the majority of my days on my PC, whether for school, leisure, or creative work, sharing this space feels like an intimate glimpse into the rhythm of my everyday life. A primary principle of the Social Construction of Technology (SCOT) is that design outcomes are contingent upon the social contexts and interpretive communities that shape them (Pinch & Bijker, 1984; Klein & Klainmann, 2002). For me, that “community” involves my husband’s meticulously organized habits, my neurodivergent working rhythms, and the cultural aesthetics I draw from the games and media that influence my visual sensibilities. My desktop embodies the overlap between order and constraint, not due to design logic alone, but because it materializes shared domestic and internal negotiations.

My desktop operates as a multimodal text that communicates meaning through spatial composition, colour and organization. The most salient features are the background image, the central interface elements, and the three clusters of icons arranged across the screen. My background depicts an image from the Silent Hill 2 Remake, a frame from the remake of a 2001 game series that resonated with me as a teenager for its psychological depth and themes of grief and guilt. The muted palette helps prevent overstimulation, and I find it quite calming, although my husband thinks it looks a little depressing. The central UI elements display the date and time. Although there is an audio visualizer beneath the time, it is a plain line that remains unconfigured, with its presence symbolizing my tendency towards ambitious customization without always following through, a small reflection of my creative impulses and executive dysfunction. The three icon clusters suggest an illusory order. As Kress and van Leeuwen (2001, 1996) describe in the grammar of visual design, framing determines how visual elements are perceived as belonging together or being apart. Strong framing through spatial boundaries and separation communicates hierarchy and stability, while weak framing conveys fluidity and interconnection. The clusters on my desktop demonstrate an overlap of these poles: their separation into three distinct areas implies categories and intention, yet their internal inconsistencies reveal weak framing, with logic giving way to improvisation. The bottom right corner is dedicated to games, with The Elder Scrolls franchise, my special interest, prominently arranged at the top, while the upper clusters lack discernible logic. This visual order hides the chaos underneath, mirroring my attempt to emulate my husband’s structured habits. While a few years ago my desktop would’ve been a screen with unsorted icons and loose files floating purposelessly across it, my husband’s OCPD drives an exceptional neatness that I admire but struggle to maintain. A common theme in our relationship is my trying very hard to emulate his cleanliness and organization, despite my organizational capacity being hindered by my ADHD, so it’s a weak imitation. He always makes the bed perfectly, and I try to do that as well, but often the comforter is asymmetrical, the pillows are the wrong way, or the sheets underneath are not as well-made as the comforter would suggest. My desktop, like our shared space, becomes a negotiation between intention and entropy, offering a visual performance of order that conceals the more chaotic processes underneath. My ongoing customization efforts, both complete and abandoned, represent my desire for mastery and order as well as my distributed agency across systems. The unresponsive audio visualization, for instance, becomes a metaphor for the limits of my individual will within my surrounding technical assemblies. Like N. Katherine Hayles’s (2017) distributed cognition, it represents unfinished dialogue between system and self, demonstrating the evolution of aesthetic and functional design together in lived practice. 

My desktop extends beyond a simple interface and becomes an active participant in my cognitive and emotional ecosystem. The organization of icons, shortcuts and widgets form a cognitive assemblage, a collaborative network including my memories, preferences, and sensory thresholds, that exists alongside file hierarchies and processing systems (Hayles, 1999). My identity and routines do not emerge purely from intention, but from the continuous exchange with the technologies that sustain them. My desktop thus becomes both a mirror of my self and a collaborator in my evolution; it archives traces of attention over time, enables and reflects flow states. It is a multimodal text with spatial framing that encodes my ongoing attempt to reconcile structure with disorder. 

References

Hayles, N. K. (1999). How we became posthuman: Virtual bodies in cybernetics, literature, and informatics. University of Chicago Press.

Hayles, N. K. (2017). Unthought: The Power of the Cognitive Nonconscious. University of Chicago Press.

Klein, H. K., & Kleinman, D. L. (2002). The Social Construction of Technology: Structural Considerations. Science, Technology, & Human Values, 27(1), 28–52. http://www.jstor.org/stable/690274

Kress, G.R., & Van Leeuwen, T. (2001). Multimodal discourse: The modes and media of contemporary communication. Oxford University Press.

Kress, G, & Van Leeuwen, T. (1996). Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design. New York: Routledge.

Pinch, T., & Bijker, W. E. (1984). The social construction of facts and artifacts: Or how the sociology of science and the sociology of technology might benefit each other. Social Studies of Science, 14(3), 399–441.