Physical Computing’s Greatest Hits (and Misses)
Reading this was humbling, to say the least. I expected to find a list with cool projects I could maybe borrow and try to make for myself, but what I got instead was more like a map of every “original” idea a beginner is likely to have. Theremins, gloves, floor pads, things you yell at, fields of grass, the endless lure of blinking LEDs, mirrors that are digital to easily wow every person with a limited understanding of technology (and even those who have more than a limited understanding of technology), things to hug. Everything has already been charted out and accounted for. I do like that the author mentions that some students, upon realizing their idea has been done before, just give up. which he thinks is exactly the wrong reaction. His take is that these themes keep coming back because they leave room for genuine variation, and the interesting part is never the concept itself but what a particular person does with it.
Something that stuck with me was how unflinching he is about each theme’s weaknesses. A theremin is fun, yeah, but congrats on waving your hand, I guess. What does it mean? What now? Video mirrors are beautiful and also happen to offer almost zero structured interaction (hah, screen savers). Meditation helpers can’t read minds. Remote hugs don’t actually feel like hugs. He isn’t dunking on any of these ideas, but is rather saying that the baseline, easy version of each one is surface-level, and real design work is whatever comes AFTER you’ve built that surface and started asking harder questions.
That reframing is how my thought process usually works. Rather than creating something and wondering only if it works, I also like to ask myself if the gesture I’m asking for is actually worth asking for. Why use a button instead of a pull, or a wave or a shout? What does this action feel like in my body, and does it match what I want the piece to be about? Ultimately, despite us all learning the same coding language and basics of Arduino, we all end up with different projects because of how we individually come up with ideas. As long as you know the basics, you can bend the rules after as much as you want.
Making Interactive Art: Set the Stage, Then Shut Up and Listen
This reading opens up with a pretty blunt rule, “Don’t interpret your own work,” and then spends the rest of it explaining why this rule exists. To Igoe, interactive art isn’t something you deliver to an audience, but rather, is a conversation you’re starting with them. If you stand next to your piece telling people what each element represents and how they should feel about it, you’ve already pre-written their experience, and at that point, there’s no reason for them to actually engage with what you made. (For this reason, I like to read museum labels for paintings AFTER I’ve engaged with the piece, so I can experience it twice. I found that it doesn’t usually work the other way… thank you, anchoring bias!)
The analogy that made this click was directing an actor. You can’t tell a performer what to feel and expect anything real to come out. Rather, you arrange the space, place the props, suggest intentions, and let them figure out the emotions themselves. An interactive piece works the same way: put a handle on what you want touched, make unapproachable things unapproachable, drop hints towards what you want discovered, and then (with all due respect), back off. The catch, though, is you need to genuinely trust the audience, and trust that what you built is legible enough to speak for itself (scary!) for it to work. Igoe’s point is also that these reactions are also data, not failures to argue with.
An interactive piece is never really “done”. The object you build is just a stage, and the audience finishes the work every time they walk up to it, slightly different each time. That’s a pretty different mental model from traditional art, and I suspect it’s one of those things that doesn’t fully sink in until you’ve actually watched strangers misuse something you made.
And…
Back-to-back, these two readings feel like they have similar arguments made from two angles. The first is about what to make, while the second is how to present what you made. Both converge on a single idea, that you kind of… aren’t the point (sorry). The gesture is the point, and the person performing it is the point. We’re really putting the interaction (between our performer and the gestures in between to communicate with the work) in interactive media. Hahaha. Sorry.