Research: My Definition Of Interaction
In my opinion, interaction is a mutual action with two sides taking part in, usually the two sides include one beings and the other objects. Interaction happens when one side displays information and the other side responses to alter or make the piece of information meaningful or completed.
I researched on two interactive art artifacts. The first one is called Eternal Blue, which is an Invisible digital dimensions of reality. “Created by Richard Vijgen, ‘Eternal Blue‘ is an installation at the University of Maastricht (NL) that visualizes tens of thousands of malicious packets caught by the University’s firewall as they happen. ”
Richard Vijgen Eternal Blue – Invisible digital dimensions of reality July 4th 2022
I think the Eternal Blue doesn’t align with my definition of interaction because it basically serves as a clock which its patterns change every 24 hours. So it only send the information about time to people on campus when changing the slowly rotating sphere to represent different times. I think the other side, which is people who looks at this unique clock do not have any respond or feedback to the clock itself, it is more like a one-way launcher to give message out, thus, I don’t see there exist any interaction in my understanding.
The second one is a project called “Mind the ‘Uuh’ – Train yourself to avoid using uuh fill words”. It is a small machine used to count the numbers of how many “Uuh” words one says during a speech or conversation. “There is a bell, a volume knob which controls how hard the bell is hit or to turn it silent, a counter for your “uuh” stats and a reset button. The product design is deliberately making references to classic alarm clocks to convey the nature of Mind the “Uuh” intuitively.”
Mind the ‘Uuh’ – Train yourself to avoid using uuh fill words Apr 22nd 2022
I think the project”Mind the Uuh” does align with my definition of Interaction. In this case, the speaker says words like “Uuh” and the small machine count every time, accumulate the overall number and make the alarm clock sound to remind the speaker of his “Uuh” habit, which is a relatively bad one.When the speaker receive that he says “Uuh” too much, he or she will deliberately try to stop him/herself from saying those words, thus the numbers on the counting screen will decrease over time, and the alarm clock will stop making noise frequently. So in this process, a speaker and the small machine altogether make an interaction, for the response of those “Uuh” words is mutual.
At first glance, I had the feeling of mutual communication, mutual effects or mutual feedbacks in the word “Interaction”, then I looked into these two researches and find out more about interaction. Fundamentally, I summarize the action of showing running time and using alarm clock and counting machine into an action of sending information to us human beings, so what fits the definition of interact is that there must exist feedback on our human side. So in the case of “Eternal Blue”, I think basically it is just a novel clock that tells people what time it is, but we humans aren’t responding back to it, on the other hand, the “Mind the Uuh” machine reminds prople of their wrong behavior, so human’s decreasing times of saying Uuh can be sent back to the machine and responding back again with simply less noise from the alarm and less number on the screen, but that is a complete process of “interaction”.