Towards design for cultural metainterfaces: aesthetic experience and human agency in digital culture

The pervasive presence of digital technology in everyday life has intensified discussions about the shift to digital culture—an environment where our virtual and physical selves continually intertwine. This raises a question: which reality holds greater sway over our agency? Such inquiry requires close attention to design decisions, as they play a key role in shaping digital culture through the aesthetic experiences they enable and carry substantial ethical responsibility. In this paper, we explore how human agency is transformed within digital culture, offering a philosophical reflection on the concept of the metainterface as the discursive domain within which this transformation happens. Our central claim is that a critical interrogation of interface design is imperative to move beyond commercially driven models of digital metainterfaces that privilege control and efficiency toward autonomous agency. Instead, we advocate for design approaches rooted in enactivist theory, which emphasize participatory sense-making and embodied engagement. We argue that enactivist-informed, aesthetically oriented interfaces can provide conditions for autonomous agency, allowing users to engage with technology in reflective, value-driven, and ethically mindful ways. This shift is aimed at repositioning interface design as a meaningful cultural practice capable of supporting richer, more responsible forms of interaction.