During marhaba week I was being trained as a Weyak facilitator. The drill was simple: one person speaks, the other listens really listens and then reflects back what they understood. I tried using that outside the training too, with friends. I noticed something uncomfortable: I’m decent at the first two moves, listening and interpreting, but I stumble on the third one that is speaking back clearly and on time. Reading Crawford snapped that pattern into focus. His “listen, think, speak” cycle didn’t feel like theory only.
Also, I don’t agree with everything. He says reading a book isn’t interactive. I get his point (a book can’t answer back), but as a reader I still feel a kind of inner talk with the text. For design work, his strict rule helps; for real life, it feels a bit narrow. Still, his main idea don’t confuse reaction with real back-and-forth was very useful.
The book also made me think about control. Sometimes a system looks interactive, but the user is just pressing “next” while the program forces its path. That’s not a real conversation. It also somehow reminds me of home: there’s a lot of noise and movement during the protest against corruption, but the direction is being set by a few people with their own goals. Everyone is acting, but very few are actually listening. It’s busy, not interactive exactly the difference Crawford talks about.
While reflecting on all this, I realized something about my own art. The digital sketch I had been working on suddenly looked lifeless—beautiful in pieces but, to me, dead. It wasn’t listening to the user; it just sat there. That recognition pushed me to start over. I stripped out the old smoke elements and rebuilt the scene around the burning parliament building, designing an interaction where a single click can pause the fire and wash the frame in blue. In the process, Crawford’s idea of a true “listen–think–speak” loop came alive for me: my sketch now responds instead of merely flashing back.
Lastly, what I appreciated in the book is how stubbornly he refuses to call every flashy response “interactive.” He cares about the quality of the loop: how precisely the system listens, how intelligently it processes, and how meaningfully it responds.