Just like every Interactive Media major (or people who intended to major) who once was a freshman fighting to get a spot on any of these courses, I always used to wonder what exactly this name meant. What makes media interactive? And especially, as mentioned in the text, to what extent can (or should) our media be interactive?
Diving into the world of User Experience Design, I learned that interactivity is a result rather than a component we can add to our projects. In some sense, proper user interaction ends up being more of a reward, born from “good/correct” design decisions, rather than a feature added inside our work. As much as it’s ideal to think of interactivity as a simple exchange of information as in: the developer sets a certain function for the user, the user makes use of it, and feedback returns, reality shows us that it is not easy. Humans are attracted to certain things, and interaction is the ultimate signal of respect for them. We touch whatever thing we are curious about, we smell it, we taste it and we look over and over for it. The question comes as to whether our projects are able to return that feeling. Are our objects able to talk? If so, then our interactivity is born essentially from how well they can also listen to the feedback that they will receive. If we can portray information, but most importantly, if we can, at the same time, receive and react to the information that comes back, then we have achieved interactivity.
User interaction has a long way to go. AI has shown that we are easily capable of generating a high level of interaction with machines, either verbally or virtually. Therefore, I am more than excited to see what the future of user experience and interaction has in store for us.