Chapter 1 of The design of Everyday Things was quite interesting because it mentioned the (occasionally conflicting) relationship between aesthetics and function; specifically his ideas about affordance. I think we often forget the fact that regardless of how we design something to be used, what matters is how the user acrually uses it. Which brings us to the importance of feedback- a designer can never be detached from their target audience. Effective design is therefore more a process than a product, with constant communication between user and designer. I never thought of it that way, considering design to be more of a static object than a mechanism working off of constant feedback- which is what I found most interesting about the text.

The Art of Interactive Design was, in my opinion, very astute in its endeavour to talk about interactivity by first acknowledging the fluidity of the term. However, after reading the text, I think I might have more questions than answers; for example, in playing a game, we’re supposedly interacting with the other players, not the game itself, right? But in a game such as, say, Dungeons and Dragons, in which the moves are decided by dice, can we say the game is interacting with us? (Unless my understanding of the game is entirely wrong). Maybe this just rates low on the interactivity scale? Either way, though I’m still confused, the whole idea of interactivity being relative and non binary was interesting because it better explains interactivity as a concept while, as I mentioned earlier, acknowledging that the term is fluid.