1. What do you consider to be the characteristics of a strongly interactive system?
Reading the essay, and considering the technological systems we interact with every day made me reflect considerably about interactivity, and especially how it relates to intuitive design, user experience, and user interfaces.
I would consider strongly interactive systems to be systems that users have significant control over what the system performs, with significant room for user creativity. In this regard, a command line interface (CLI) terminal is an incredibly interactive system. However, simultaneously a CLI is also extremely unintuitive and can require years of experience to become comfortable and fully acquainted.
Researchers at Xerox PARC developed graphical user interfaces (GUIs) to provide significantly more intuitive experience for users. However, in my opinion, a GUI can be significantly more limiting for interactivity in certain cases, as compared to a CLI (e.g., most internet servers require operators to interact through CLIs). Other tools however, such as Adobe Photoshop, could likely not exist without the existence of a GUI. In these cases, it is the GUI that enables the creativity and all interaction. Furthermore, developers must design these GUIs to be open-ended, providing a list of tools that artists can operate to accomplish a wide array of goals.
As tools such as ChatGPT become common place, I again began to wonder how interactivity will adapt as AI agents begin to interact with computers for us, and we interact with these models through natural language or even speech. I suspect we are again at the precipice of a revolution in human computer interaction (HCI), where our interactions with computers changes profoundly.
2. What ideas do you have for improving the degree of user interaction in your p5 sketches?
In regards to interactivity with p5.js, the design comparison from before again comes to mind: some GUIs are designed by developers to enable users to accomplish a very specific set of goals (e.g., Microsoft Word, or Grammarly). In these applications, users are relatively limited to a specific way of doing things, and features that are not implemented in the GUI are likely not possible. Other creative applications (i.e., Photoshop) provide users a set of tools that enable open-ended problem solving, where the developers likely do not foresee many of the ways their tools will be applied. I would like to experiment more with the latter–enabling users to inject their own creativity into the system, and sparking a higher degree of interactivity.