One part of the reading that stood out to me was the distinction between interaction and reaction. It says, “Interaction and reaction are apples and oranges, horses of different colors, tigers of different stripes.” This made me think about how easy it is to mistake a system reacting to the user for a system actually being interactive.
A strongly interactive system, to me, is something that is open to interpretation and interaction in a way where the user is truly connected to the system through an action-reaction ecosystem. The user’s actions should have some meaning within the system, rather than simply triggering a response that could have happened regardless of what they did.
In my current sketches, I only let the user control the local state of the sketch using mouse clicks and drags. The sketch reacts to what the user does, but after reading this, I think there is more I could do to make that interaction meaningful. I could make a sketch that expects a more explicit answer or question from the user and responds back to them in a meaningful way.
It should also involve me, as the developer, communicating a message or feeling that is open to interpretation. The user should be able to affect the sketch while also forming their own interpretation of what the sketch is trying to communicate. That feels closer to the kind of interaction described in the reading, rather than simply making a sketch that reacts to inputs.
