After reading the excerpt from Chris Crawford’s “The Art of Interactive Design” I am excited to explore my own personal definition of what interactivity is and how I can apply it to what we create in class. I think I would also use the three categories Crawford gave us to determine whether or not something is interactive. Listening, speaking, and thinking seem to be the standard for ‘quality interaction’ so I believe we should also apply them in our design process. I think the listening part might be the most difficult to implement because I’m not exactly sure how that would be done creatively.
To improve the user interaction in my P5 sketches I think even just consciously asking myself, is this program listening, thinking speaking, will show results in one way or another. However, to go further, I think I’d like to let my imagination go a bit further and consider what I’d enjoy interacting with. So far, I have been limiting myself to rather simple projects because I was afraid of the more daunting aspects of implementation. Using these three key standards I think even implementing my ideas will be easier because I can ask myself, well how do I do this? Ok, if the program is ‘thinking’ about what the user wants, maybe I can code a few options for the program to choose from based on user input and what it hears.
Similar to what Reas seemed to be advocating for, I think Crawford wants us to think a bit more abstractly. Whether or not something is interactive might be a harder question to answer than what one might expect and can be debatable in many different contexts.