Chris Crawford provided, in my opinion, a great explanation for what people think interactivity is, and how it should look like in real. Although some might find the author’s claims surprising, I, personally, always had pretty much the same thoughts on the matter of interactivity. I am not sure when Chris Crawford wrote this, but it seems that the word “interactivity” is still quite often overused and, perhaps, even misused or confused with the words react or participate.
The thing that I see differently though, is I believe we should clearly separate the interactivity with people and the interactivity with machines. While the former should obviously “listen, think and speak”, the latter can be limited to “taking in and responding”, and maybe add “processing” in between. The strongly interactive system, as I see it, would include all three of these features, and would obviously allow us, users, to influence the outcome. Nowadays, with the rise of Generative AI, interactivity with machines is moving on to a completely different and advanced level, and the goal of people working in the interactivity design industry is to keep up with the fast pace of new technologies to be able to integrate them into the work they create for users.
Another idea from the reading that I liked is of mixing the “art” and the “code” people as it can indeed enhance the experience we get from using the technologies. It is important to have a diverse set of skills and knowledge, and back-end programmers who can also understand the goals of graphic/UX/UI designers (and vice-versa) can significantly improve the level of work. It is interesting to see such a mix even in our class – people who were majoring in Computer Science or other technical (and direct) disciplines throughout the whole time in the university come to Interactive Media class to learn about art.
As I have mentioned in the conclusion of my Assignment 3 blog post, my goal for the next assignments will be to add interactivity to what I create. Of course, I will not be able to do it on an advanced level yet, but I certainly want my work to give a certain response – audio and visual. For my midterm, I am considering creating a game, which is an example of interactivity, at least by my own definition of this word.