The Interfaces Institute
A building with a basement of documented failures, a stairwell of principles, and floors for primitives, components, patterns and whole systems — 63 rooms, from 26 collections reproduced whole out of published standards to six failures traced to the principle each one broke.
The building
Every published room, floor by floor as the building stands. Each one stands on its own, so start anywhere. Beside each floor are the collections it draws on.
One object, named trade-off, read at five grains.
The grammar book. Every entry carries an avoid-when.
Exhibits
The specimen cabinet: components as seven design systems really draw them.
Inputs, outputs, latency, and the seven states.
Eleven principles, each shipped with its own misuse.
Failures, documented and loved rather than hidden.
Tools to use, and the reference that runs through every floor.
What the data says
§Three findings from the ground floor, each one a join between sources that were never meant to be read together.
The lag
Twelve of thirty patterns have no native primitive at all. The menu button got one in January 2025; the accordion in September 2024; the dialog in 2022, for a pattern that shipped in 1984. The switch, on every phone since 2007, still has none.
30 patterns → reproducedThe pattern register
Twenty-three of thirty specify keyboard interaction. The seven that do not are mostly static structures — a breadcrumb is a list of links, and needs no keys of its own.
30 patterns → derivedThe keyboard grammar
Arrow Down, Arrow Up and Enter are each bound by thirteen patterns; Home and End by eleven. Space and Enter do not activate the same things, which is where the confusion comes from — the specification itself is inconsistent.
27 keys →