“Most users probably won’t be able to describe it, but I hope they can feel it,” says Alan Dye, Apple’s Vice President of Human Interface Design. He’s referencing the company’s latest undertaking, but he may as well be talking about any of Apple’s innovations over the past half-century. At the core of the company’s synapse-rewiring, society-shaping ingenuity lies a sensory push-and-pull: between the materials of the physical world and the newly developed textures, pioneered in large part by Apple’s designers themselves, of the emergent digital one.
“Apple has a long history of using metaphors,” Dye notes, citing some of the earliest referential details of the user interface: a Files icon that resembles a manila folder or the Books app’s hardwood backdrop. Glass, historically, has been chief amongst these house codes: There’s the iconic Glass Cube Fifth Avenue storefront in New York, Apple Park‘s glossy loop in Cupertino, and iPhone’s infinite black screen.
The pendulum between a reverence for the tactile and the embrace of a more digital visual language has swung back and forth over the years (2013, for example, saw the advent of iOS 7, when the design team opted for a flatter, more monochromatic interface). But today, as Apple launches iOS 26, the company’s first-ever design update to extend across all Apple platforms globally, it will engage with this tactile tension in an entirely new way. The update’s marquee feature is Liquid Glass—a translucent new digital material that refracts the light from its surroundings the way real glass would, undulating in response to human touch like crystalline jelly.
“We’ve [created] a digital material that does things no physical material could do, while maintaining all the qualities that a real piece of glass would,” Dye says of the offering, which will be most recognized by the average Apple user as a sense of added dimension and depth to the Apple interface. (It follows, then, that the process for creating Liquid Glass would be a tactile one. Dye’s Human Interface Design team is oriented alongside Apple’s in-house industrial design studio, which allows both sets of designers to convene regularly to study how various glass prisms interacted with light—a form of “sketching,” according to Dye.)
All of this, for Dye, comes back to the company’s reverence for the romance of physical materials—a sensibility no one can relate better to than an artist. Here, two of them—Alice Bucknell, whose core materials include CGI and game engines, and video and performance artist P. Staff—reflect on the role of Apple’s boundary-warping technology on their practices.
CULTURED: How does technology support your work?
Alice Bucknell: As an artist working with game engines to make video games and CGI films, technology is at the center of my practice. It allows me to bring speculative worlds and complex narratives into immersive virtual environments that feel both reality-adjacent and open to other possible futures.
P. Staff: Everything I do is filtered through technology, and it is a space of play as much as resistance and promiscuity with form.
CULTURED: What textures and feelings do you associate with Liquid Glass?
Staff: I have long been fascinated by transparency and the surface of the screen, and the sensation of penetrating multiple layers of information and imagery.
Bucknell: To me, Liquid Glass is a kind of sensing layer between a user and her content. I think of lightness, fluidity, and a dynamic interplay between the senses—heightening one’s experience while reducing the traditional footprint of the interface and transforming it into a bridge between worlds.
CULTURED: Does Apple’s design approach resonate with your own practice?
Bucknell: I love Apple’s handling of the interface as something that intuits the user’s actions. In my work, I understand video games as “affective interfaces” where for experimenting with agency and possibility, and Apple’s approach to design holds a similar resonance.
Staff: I am equally fascinated by color, haptics, and sensation. Where does the body end and the technology begin?
