The reading was actually so much more interesting than I thought it would be. I like that Crawford included playful moments and examples throughout because it kept me more interested while he was trying to explain an idea that could have easily felt more technical. To me, there was one line that really stood out, and that was when he said “interaction is not reaction on a higher plane of existence.” At first I didn’t really think that there was even a difference between reacting to something and interacting with something. I assumed that if something made me feel involved or allowed me to do something, then that was already interactive. Crawford made me question all of that. This also changed my way of thinking about interactions with Code. A computer is not automatically interactive just because I can click something or because something on the screen gets a reaction out of me. Interaction is more like a conversation.
He says both sides need to listen, think and respond. This made me look at the assignments that I’ve been doing in a completely different way. Instead of only asking whether the user can click or move or control something, I started to think about how the computer responds to what the user does and whether there’s a real back and forth happening. I used to think adding something like mousePressed() automatically made a project interactive because the user could affect it, but now I know it’s beyond all that. So my biggest takeaway from this reading is definitely that interaction is much less simple than I originally thought it was.