In “What Exactly Is Interactivity?”, the first Chapter of Chris Crawford’s book, “The Art of Interactive Design,” Crawford attempts to lay down a definition of what interactivity entails from which certain guidelines for interactive design could be extrapolated. He essentially posits that interactivity is a cyclic process of listening, thinking, and speaking that involves two or more actors – much like the process of conversating with other human beings. Going off this definition, Crawford weeds out certain activities as “non-interactive,” from reading books and watching movies to dancing and attending theatrical performances. By arguing that participation in these activities involves a “strong reaction,” which is qualitatively different from strong interaction, he excludes these forms of activities which may be labeled by some as interactive as strictly devoid of the necessary back-and-forth between actors that characterizes high levels of interactivity.
One of the things I appreciated about Crawford’s discursive thought process as he distills what makes things interactive, in addition to his humor and the use of examples to illustrate his points, was the idea that interactivity does not have to be an exclusive binary, but could be assigned a value on a spectrum from low to high. Based on this approach, people subjectively assign degrees of interactivity to certain activities. It did, however, strike me as a little contradictory to go on to adjudicate that some activities were definitively non-interactive, even though some may experientially feel like they were. It also begs the question of whether different people were unified in their understanding of what interactivity is when assigning values to the degree of interactivity they experienced.
Crawford then goes on to theorize the differences between user interface and interactivity designers. While the former mainly considers structure and form, the latter is more concerned with how a given target function is best served by one form over the other. He also makes the observation that interactivity designers come from a less technical background and are often underserved by their inability to match the more established knowledge, frameworks, and technical expertise employed by their counterparts in the user interface domain.
The definition of interactivity as a recurring process of listening, thinking, and speaking stuck with me as I contemplated the forms of interactivity that people claim to have incorporated into their work when making web applications or digital artworks. While conversations are dynamic, forward-moving, and seldom repeating, many of the interactive elements embedded in digital creations are rarely so. In conversation, actors have a large space of sentences to choose from when speaking and an almost infinite thought space from which a thought could form. This leads to conversations that are new and fresh every time. In the digital space, this is less likely as user interaction is restricted to a small set of defined actions (e.g. clicks or movements) that are mapped to algorithmically consistent behaviors. How do we then emulate the full range of fluidity that true interactivity entails, given that we are sometimes restricted by computational resources? I think the rise in generative AI tools is definitely getting us closer to actualizing Crawford’s interactivity. I am, however, left wondering if Crawford’s definition of interactivity is restrictive. It seems to place high expectations on designers to equip themselves with higher-end technologies to satisfy Crawford’s interactivity guidelines, which may counteractively act as a deterrent.