# Behavioural Interface

Canonical URL: https://jeanyoon.ch/oi/texts/behavioural-interface
Type: essay / research note
Author: Jeanyoon Choi (최정윤)
Date: 2024-08-09

## Summary

In this 2024 note, Jeanyoon Choi defines a behavioural interface as one that does not announce its functions through buttons or icons but reveals them when an unintended action, such as a hand movement registered by a phone's accelerometer, triggers them. In his work Ω, an incidental movement during an ordinary personality test starts to dismantle the vectorised space, acting as bodily resistance. Choi argues that such interfaces matter less for surprise than for estrangement, which makes participants reconsider their relation to the system.

## 요약 (Korean)

최정윤은 버튼 없이 의도치 않은 행동으로 숨은 기능이 드러나는 '행동적 인터페이스'를 정의하고, 휴대폰을 흔들면 벡터 공간이 무너지는 『Ω』를 예로 든다.

## Concepts defined

- **Behavioural Interface**: An interface whose functions are not announced by buttons or icons but remain latent until a participant's unintended action, such as moving a phone, reveals them, changing the participant's relation to the system.

## Questions this answers

### What is a behavioural interface?

In Jeanyoon Choi's sense, a behavioural interface keeps some functions latent rather than displaying them as buttons, and reveals them when a participant's unintended behaviour, such as moving or speaking, triggers them, giving that action unannounced consequences.

### How does the accelerometer work in Jeanyoon Choi's artwork Ω?

Participants begin an ordinary personality test on their phones; an incidental hand movement activates an accelerometer-based response that starts to dismantle the vectorised space, turning a movement outside the questionnaire into bodily resistance to its terms.

Topics: behavioural interface, mobile interaction design, accelerometer, hidden interaction, estrangement, multi-device web artwork

References: Ω (artwork by Jeanyoon Choi), KAIST Museum, [Accelerometer](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerometer)

## Full text

A behavioural interface does not announce every available action through a button or icon. Some functions remain latent until an unintended movement reveals them. This is particularly interesting on a phone, which registers much more than deliberate touches.

In Ω, a participant begins with an ordinary personality test. An incidental movement of the hand activates an accelerometer-based response. The resulting disturbance starts to dismantle the vectorised space. A movement outside the explicit questionnaire becomes a bodily resistance to its terms.

For a proposed AI work at KAIST Museum, I considered reversing that sequence. Phone motion would initially rotate the surrounding scene. An accidental spoken word would then trigger speech and language-model processes, revealing propagation and back-propagation across the screens. The everyday action would unexpectedly expose a different layer of the work.

Not every participant will discover such an interface, and discovery need not happen at the same point. Its force comes from an action acquiring consequences that were not announced in advance.

The estrangement matters as much as surprise. A hidden interaction can make someone step back from the situation and reconsider how they have been participating. It changes their relation to the system, rather than merely rewarding them with another feature.

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Jeanyoon Choi (최정윤) is a Korean computational artist and researcher (b. 1999), PhD candidate at KAIST XD Lab, making multi-device web artworks. Profile: https://jeanyoon.ch/oi/en. Index: https://jeanyoon.ch/llms.txt.