In his book, Crawford critiques the manifold ways we tend to ‘wrongly’ define interactivity. For him, it is more of a “conversation: a cyclic process in which two actors alternately listen, think and speak” (8). I really appreciated how he explained this idea using an analogy of two people conversing. While this helped me understand why the elements of this process are not substitutable, what really struck me was the difference he highlighted between interaction and reaction. He notes the sensation we get from reading, for instance, as describing an “intense reaction, and [that] interaction is not reaction on a higher plane of existence” (13). This can be very useful when it comes to designing for people. It allows us to take a step back and wonder whether our product is actually interactive or just a really well-dressed trigger. He cautions that, in this case, he is “not arguing that interactivity is the sole gauge of merit” (14).
However, this is where I find his language to not really match his claim. While he does mention that not everything needs to be highly interactive to be good, he introduces an interactivity spectrum, arguing that things like the refrigerator light are still technically interactive, just at a very low level. He even calls the fridge interaction “silly and beneath the intellectual dignity of almost everybody” (11). If interactivity were truly just one dimension among many, as he insists, there would be no reason for him to give low interactivity scores to certain things and dismiss them. This brings me to the question he raises in the chapter: “Does interactivity exist in the eye of the interactor?” (11). Saying something is low interactivity instead of not interactive still requires someone to decide where exactly it falls on that 0-to-10 scale, and Crawford never really explains who gets to make that call or by what standard. I think that his own examples suggest the answer is just him (his judgement), hence the name: “Crawford Scale” (15). So while I agree his framework gives us a much richer vocabulary than a strict binary, I do not think it earns the objectivity he implies it has. Nonetheless, this reading helped me ground what we mean by an interactive design, which I will use as a heuristic to evaluate my designs henceforth.