I greatly enjoyed the discourse on interactivity versus reactivity, and as someone who’s been trying to read a lot recently, the description the author gives on why books are not interactive was enlightening. An interactive object has to “listen, think, and speak”, and when you think about it, many forms of entertainment center around the object “speaking” to us, be it a TV or a book.
For a piece to be a good interactive piece, it has to strike a good balance between the three as pointed out by the author, and “trading off” one component to prioritize the other two weakens the whole project’s interactivity as a whole. However, personally I feel that for an interactive piece, I disagree with the author in that it doesn’t need to fulfill all three components to be a successful piece. For example, Chris Milk’s “The Treachery of Sanctuary” may not be the most interactive piece from the “listening” perspective, but it does “think, and speak” well enough to compensate for the relatively few actions that a viewer can take, saying a lot even if it isn’t listening that much ( for example, the first two screens where it doesn’t really matter what the viewer is doing ).
A question I had was that I struggled to understand how an object would “think”. I understood it in the context of a conversation between two people, but I don’t really get it from the perspective of something like an art piece. In my opinion, the “think” part of an interactive object does not matter too much, and the most important parts is “listening” and then “speaking” back an appropriate reply, though “thinking” is likely needed to construct a good reply. Is the “thinking” for a piece then simply how the UI/robot/art constructs a reply to a user’s interaction with the piece?