Research: How you define interaction?

What do I think of interaction?

As its name, I think the most important part of interaction is to interact. According to the book <The Art of Interactive Design>, the author mentions that interactivity is just like a conversation maintaining listening, thinking, and speaking, which metaphorically mean input, process, and output. However, the key point about the interactive process is that there are two actors. Actors should intend to be purposeful creatures, which I think is an important point to discriminate “act” and “interact”.

What’s more, as the author goes in the article named “Making Interactive Art: Set the Stage, Then Shut Up and Listen”, we shouldn’t interpret our own work after we create them. Instead, we should listen to how people think of our work. “It is just the beginning of a conversation with people who experience your work.”

Above all, I will define interaction as a thing with interacting and creating.

Is there an example?

I found an interesting project on http://creativeapplications.net which is called “Out of Line” (Here’s a video of it). “It invites visitors to draw hundreds of lines on top of a music video. All lines are saved on their servers and are then rendered into the video to be seen by future visitors.” Also, I found that the line creators can follow the instruction of the videos, such as “Follow my finger” or “Fill up this place”, and hundreds of lines will appear. Thus, people can interact both with the video makers and the line creators, and also create their own things. This is a process filled with interacting and creating.

However, here’s another project which seems not that “interactive”. In other words, I think it may be a kind of interaction but still have spaces to improve. It is called “种水计划” (video is here). The author explains that this project wants to show how people influence nature, but the influence only appears when people stand on the water made by light. I think it can be more changeable, such as the water’s wave can show the sound that people are making. In my opinion, this work is too simple to be called an interactive project.

Citation:

Chris, Crawford. The Art of Interactive Design. No Starch Press, 2002, pp3-6.

Tigoe. Making Interactive Art: Set the Stage, Then Shut Up and Listen. https://www.tigoe.com/blog/category/physicalcomputing/405/ 21 August 2012.