I liked how the author took the vague concept of ‘interactivity’ and was able to neatly break it down into three simple parts. When I think of the word, I imagine a fairly basic system where an otherwise one-sided info dump is intentionally broken up by prompting the user to engage with it. For example, an educational application might have the user answer questions during or between readings/videos. The idea of a three-step process, where each stage requires effort and intent, makes things much more concrete to think about. The manner in which the author approaches each point was also very interesting. For example, they kept bringing up cases that were either too trivial or too exaggerated to fit into the initial argument, as well as mentioning that certain people would argue on behalf of those edge cases. This naturally led into the discussion of measuring interactivity through ‘degrees’ instead of as a yes/no, which made the argument even easier to digest. The abundance of anecdotes, similes, and metaphors also did a lot to illustrate their points while providing a source of entertainment that helped me get through the reading.
In my own work for this class, I have made some effort for all of my weekly production pieces to include some form of basic interactivity. The second week’s piece allowed the user to move their specific block around and paint in the gridlike canvas, along with some other functionality, and this week’s piece provides some ability to manipulate the layered shapes and essentially create new variations on the spot, or to focus on the appearance while the layers are in motion. I wouldn’t call these strong forms of interactivity, since it really caps out at moving what’s already in the scene around. A relevant quote that stood out to me was that “participation is not the same thing as interaction,” and in these cases the user is really just participating due to the very limited input and feedback.