What is interactivity? What are some essential qualifiers to be interactive? This is the essential question the author starts with. The answer he gives is a combination of three metaphorical steps: listening, thinking, and speaking. He also argues that interactivity might not be a dichotomy; instead, it could be described with degrees. I agree with most of the author’s points that in order for something to be interactive, it must proactively give responses to another’s actions or inputs. However, as the author also mentions, the degree of interactivity among things that are interactive could vary, and therefore, I am thinking about the value of interactivity.
Referring the author’s example of having conversations with another person, the thinking part plays an important role. For human beings, it’s easy to imagine how the lack of thinking of either party of the conversation could destroy the entire meaning of the conversation. But what about machines and computers? Nowadays, most of the human-computer interactions rely on the same codes that run over and over again whenever the computer receives an input from the human. This is surely interactive, but is the computer in this case a good thinker as in the conversation? Instead of active thinking, the computer merely processes the input in a preset procedure and gives out its output. But it works perfectly, just as we expect it to do so. Then does interactivity matters? One example would be Siri. Surely it is cool to speak to this “virtual personal assistant” and it will help you settle things down. But do you remember how many times they can fail you? At least for me, sometimes I feel that it seems to be more convenient just to go back to traditional way of clicking. By definition, Siri might be of a higher degree of interactivity. but its actual value of being this interactive is not so definite. Therefore, I think that computers for now are still just preprogrammed machines that complete some tasks, and that its interactivity is indeed significant but a substantial improvement in its interactivity and its resulting efficiency still need more and more technological innovations.
And at this point, I think the author makes a good point in the collaboration of interaction designers and interface designers. Interaction design is definitely a new area, instead of an extension of traditional interface design, and requires new skill sets. And to achieve new technological innovations that can lead to a higher level of efficient interaction, the collaboration and exchange of ideas between these two area are crucial and necessary.