I feel like I have used the term “interactive” so many times to describe artworks but I’ve never really sat down and defined what it means to me. The author identified the same issue, and I really like how they view it as a “conversation” — a “cyclic process in which two actors alternately listen, think, and speak.”
This reading also allows me to reflect critically about the difference between interactivity, reactions, participation, etc. I think I have used them interchangeably before, and looking at the author’s classification, my two biggest questions are:
1). Who decides what category something belongs to? is it perhaps the creator, the person who experiences it, or someone else?
2) Can something fall into 2 categories at the same time?
I find this distinction useful, but I also want to complicate a claim that Crawford made. The author strongly suggests that printed books are not interactive, for no matter what the audience do or say or think, the content of the page does not change. Though this is true, I also think it exposes a gap in Crawford’s definition of interactivity. Crawford insists that the emotional engagement one experiences when reading a book is a reaction, not an interaction. Is this really true, I thought. In murder mystery books, for example, many authors leave clues and hints and expect their audience to try to solve the mystery along with the reading process. Isn’t this an interaction? Actively trying to solve the book like it’s a puzzle. Even at this exact moment, I’m having internal conversations about what Crawford wrote in this first chapter of “The Art of Interactive Design.” I’m contemplating, finding examples, finding contradicting details, trying to justify my thoughts—I think that encapsulating all of that in the term “reaction” will not do it justice. Maybe, it’s some degree of interaction, I suppose.
We tend to think of interactivity as a Boolean property…but why not think of interactivity as a continuous variable with relative measures…we might speak of interactivity as high, moderate, low, or even zero, thus solving our problem with the subjective nature of interactivity.
– Chris Crawford, page 6
On to the guiding question of how I will create a strong interactive system in my p5 sketches. I think this is a big question overall, but at the moment I’m thinking of meaningful interactions. For example, instead of mouse-pressed or key-clicked interactions, perhaps I can have more complex ones that make sense to my project. Also, decision-making can be a really fancy way of interaction. For example, in the in-class example we had with the floating balls appearing as we click on the mouse, the new ball appears at mouseX, mouseY instead of at a pre-defined coordinate. Then, the user can choose where to add a new ball. I also think that a strong interactive system makes it clear to the audience that this artwork is interactive. This can be done through explicit instructions or strong visual cues.