The Art of Interactive Design Reflection (Diya)

The first chapter of this book defines interaction as an act of communication where the two people/entities interacting with each other do the following three things: listen, think, and speak. According o the author, anything that does not follow these rules is not an interaction. However, while reading this definition I felt like it left out a lot of things and did not define what it means to listen, think, and speak. There are a lot of grey areas in this definition. For example, if I am pressing a switch that lights up an LED in a circuit made with Arduino, the circuit listens to me, thinks about what I have done in terms of processing the command, and then speaks by lighting up the LED. I would say that this is an interaction since I am doing something to make the second entity in this interaction think and say/do something back in return. But even after reading the whole text, I can’t say if the author’s definition of an interaction would fully apply to it. Since the conversation can’t move forward after this, they can say that this is not an interaction. While the author’s definition does try to define what an interaction is, it does not do so clearly. The three actions being used to define interaction are themselves extremely broad and subjective which leaves a lot of space for doubts and inaccuracies.

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