Making Interactive Art: Set the Stage, Then Shut Up and Listen
In this blog post, Tom Igoe talks about shifting the focus on what interactive art should be: instead of a complete piece, a finished artwork, we should approach it as if they were “performances”. His ideas, in my opinion, provide a valuable lesson on the final objective of interactive pieces. Every person might have their own vision and goals for their projects and art pieces, but at least for me, ultimately what I would like to achieve is to create something that people can see and be satisfied with their experience. I do not want to have to be present, or to have to talk to people explaining what they have to do in order to have the experience. In my opinion, that is the essence of interactivity and one of the key components of good design: the user should start, process and finish the experience by themselves.
Physical Computing’s Greatest Hits (and misses)
In this article, Tom Igoe discusses recurring themes in physical computing projects, highlighting popular ideas and their variations. In my opinion, I think that from this article, the author encourages creativity within these themes (physical computing recurring themes), emphasizing that even though certain ideas have been done before, there is room for originality and variation. And I personally want to emphasize this last part. “I don’t want do to that, it’s already done”, this quote resonated especially hard in my head. The reason behind this dates back to my highschool, where during a rough patch in my software development learning process, I struggled to think about projects that could be usable but would also help me learn. In my head, I was constantly repeating these exact words that the author included: “it has been done before, why care?”.
This mindset was what stopped me from improving as a creator and as a programmer. The principal of my highschool came up to me one day, and he clearly told me one example: “I do not want you to invent the wheel, and I do not want you to invent the suitcase. I want you to explore, and maybe you will end up creating the travel luggage”.
This article helped me remember those learnings, and I think the moral of the story is also one of the pillars of creativity: be able to push away your ego and work with things that are created, work on stuff that has been invented and do not shy away from these opportunities, because Rome was not built in one day, and definitely not from scratch.