This week’s first reading, Physical Computing’s Greatest Hits (and Misses), made me think a lot about different physical computing themes, some that are around me, and the things that I could integrate and do with them. A sentence that stood out to me was at the start, “Sometimes when people learning about physical computing hear that a particular idea has been done before, they give up on it, because they think it’s not original,” as I related to it both during our p5 sketches work and now with Arduino, where I pressure myself to try to create something completely different. I was really interested as I read more, and some of the things that came to my mind that I could relate to were things I have already encountered, such as the floor pad games that exist in many arcades today in different styles, and the “Fields of Grass” theme that is used in places like TeamLab and museums, where you run your hand over sensors and experience an interaction. Interestingly, the dolls and pets theme reminded me of Build-A-Bear teddies I made when I was younger, where I would press a part of the bear and hear recorded audio. While reading, I found myself thinking about my Arduino and all the different sensors I have, and I think all the ideas mentioned are great inspiration and encouraged me to look deeper and find new ways to integrate them into my projects.
This week’s second reading, Making Interactive Art: Set the Stage, Then Shut Up and Listen, brought my attention to an aspect of interactive artworks that I had not considered before, and that feels different from what people usually say. I feel like it made a lot of sense to me that users who encounter something interactive should feel comfortable giving inputs based on their instincts. What I took away from the reading is that it is important to guide the user and give them context about what they are experiencing, but not to completely tell them exactly what to do, in order to maintain the purpose of “interactivity” in the artwork. The concluding example of a director working with actors really clarified this idea and made it more convincing.
All together, I feel like both readings are well aligned with each other and added to my knowledge and understanding of interactive artworks and programming. The first reading felt more like a collection of examples and structures of how a project could be, while the second reading added to it by focusing on the user experience and interaction within that same project. The knowledge I gained connects clearly to the work I have done and will continue to do in this course, and I feel like both readings gave me ideas, inspiration, and awareness of what I should consider moving forward.