The Art of Interactive Design, Ch. 1 by Chris Crawford
Throughout the text, Chris Crawford emphasizes that interactivity requires three essential components: listening, thinking, and speaking. He illustrates this by presenting multiple examples where these elements are absent, such as reading a book, dancing, or watching a movie. I find this argument compelling, and agree when he highlights that certain situations, subjects, or objects cannot be considered truly interactive. The three conditions and examples highlighted by Crawford also resemble my own experiences in conversation. Usually, a conversation doesn’t really feel like an interaction if both parties aren’t engaged and responding. In fact, if one of the “actors”, as Crawford describes both participants in a conversation, is not thinking, listening, or speaking in response to the dialogue started by the other person, this situation might as well be like the one with an individual reading a book, an inanimate object that in spite of all the knowledge or information it contains, does not reply back.
This perspective becomes even clearer when I connect it to the coding concepts we have studied in class. A function not only interacts with variables and other elements of code to produce a visual animation or design, but each act of writing code itself is a form of interaction. In this case, the interaction arises from thinking and analyzing what is needed to structure the code, determining the requirements for it to function, and then writing it out. The system, in response, processes my input and responds to my actions, whether by successfully executing the program or by pointing out an error.
Although our current application of different technologies might be limited to a certain extent, Crawford’s argument has led me to wonder if there is a way to make non-interactive objects interactive. This draws my attention to the example of the book and makes me want to find a way in which a book can respond to our thoughts and opinions and response with enough intellectual and complexity to regard it as a form of interactivity.
