This is the first interactive project I found that align with my perception of a successful design to some extent. It is actually a screen installed at the entrance of the exhibition called “AI: More than Human”. It will act based on the theory of a mirror, reflecting synthetic forms of visitors’ movements. The most interactive and intriguing part of this design is that it can evolve, learning visitor’s postures, and generating a new visual response for each visitor at the same time. The key point, personally speaking, that makes this design successful is that it has jumped out of the static pattern of input-output, which means that the practice of giving feedback in response to the input. It uses the concept of evolution and this means that the interactive process impossible to predict. Just as I said in the previous blog, I think the unpredictability is a key factor that leads the interactive to success. This is also, I think, something that this design taught me, that to adopt the idea of unpredictability and to make the project evolve continuously during the process of the interaction, instead of giving the same interactive experience to anyone.
This interactive design is the one that is most appealing to me among all the designs that I have researched. It is actually about projection art. The women in this picture seem to be blowing bubbles, but these bubbles are actually projected. Sensors installed inside this artifact detect the air in multiple ways, send signals to the projecting part and this part creates bubbles according to the airflow condition. To allow people who are reading this article to have a more comprehensive understanding of this artifact, I inserted the link into this picture. (The previous picture is also inserted with the link). The successful part here, however, is that it successfully adopted the concept of visualization, and also, it has used similar logic compared to the first design, that using the ideology of unpredictability and evolution. Bubble-generating experiences are different for different people. This design inspired me at the point of combing visualization and unpredictability. This is a great part to be used in my final project.
Personally speaking, I think what makes a successful interactive design and experience, or in other words, the key factors of making them are continuous and spontaneous interaction process, the ideology of evolution and unpredictability, and the combination of multi senses. In the initial blog post on the group project, I emphasized the importance of continuous variation and this has been illustrated in the concept of that project. In the midterm-project, I added that interactions from both sides should be considered alike. This makes way for the idea that the interactive process should be evolving and changing unpredictably. These two project-crafting experience, along with the numerous artifacts I have researched, combined, and formulated my current perception of the interaction experience. Just as the two artifacts showed above, which both align with my interpretation of the interaction, they generate a state that allowing the audience to immerse themselves into the continuous interaction process by using making it unique, change and evolve, without being restricted by the short-term engagement. Similarly, in the article called Art, interaction and engagement written by Ernest Edmonds, he said that “Thus, activities external to the artwork itself, such as audience behavior, altered the generative process.” (7). The relatively spontaneous interaction from both sides drags the general interaction process out of the simple mind mode of input-output.
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