When Crawford mentions at the beginning of the chapter, “The term interactivity is overused and underunderstood” (3), it surprised me as I always believed interactivity involves physically engaging with technology and allowing them to respond to input. However, Crawford makes it clear with his definition being a “conversation,” since to him, a system isn’t truly interactive if it only delivers what it is supposed to respond; it has to listen, think and speak in a way that adapts over time. Additionally, as he asks questions, and even asked one, “Is interactivity utterly subjective?” It really made opened my perspective on what is interactivity, it suggests to me what feels interactive to one person might not feel that way to another, since it depends on their expectations and prior experiences. As a result, it made me realize that with some of my p5.js sketches and exercises, while technically reactive, it isn’t truly interactive.
With my sketches, they don’t have any aspect of interactivity, but they’re rather responsive, especially my previous assignment (for week 2 on loops), since within the sketch, hitting “Enter” would cause my sketch to go from a monochrome grayscale to random, simultaneous pops of color. With that, I aim for future projects to apply similar aspects of interactivity, rather than having them being responsive to user input.