Goodness me…After working through the past three weeks with my group and trying to figure out the concepts of interaction and what a definition for the term would be, I came up with the idea that that “Interaction is the receiving, processing, expressing and therefore interchanging ideas by at least two or more parties.” The two projects that I wished to explore were from CreativeApplications.net and were called “Expressive Tactile Controls” and “Anti-Drawing Machine.”
The “Anti-Drawing Machine” was a lot of fun for me to research and explore as a project. I liked it a lot because it involved the user to interact with something that changed based on their own input: Depending on the user’s pen movements, he paper would move around differently and change the output that turns out at the end of the drawing. It works due to the computer vision camera inside of the desk that controls the paper and to me it is a form of interchanging of ideas between two individual parties. The “Expressive Tactile Controls” project was fun to look at, but it didn’t fit my idea of what interaction is perfectly. Everyday switches and buttons were given personalities and tended to react to their users differently based on their personality. In my humble opinion, the people and buttons in this project are simply “reacting” to each other rather than interacting. I do not think there’s a direct exchange of information.
The idea for an interactive device that our group of five came up with, I give all positive credit to Kathy. Our group wanted to create an interactive project that provided blind children aged 8-12 to learn to read more complicated braille. The braille that we created would be laced with older, potentially no-longer existing materials from the past, such as M&Ms or Cardboard and therefore also give the children a brief history lesson and trivia about the Earth’s past. We though the project would be Interactive because it would involve Children talking to a device from the future which could process and respond to their ideas, helping to educate them on braille and world history all together. It would be a simple exchange of ideas. I was immediately on board with the idea because it sounded extremely wholesome. I’m someone who hates to see people suffer and the entire team agreed that perhaps we could go for creating something that would make blind people’s lives easier. Although we received a lot of criticism on it, and compared to a lot of the other projects that we saw, ours was a lot more serious, I’m happy that we touched on important ideas that definitely seem to need further study in the future. It was eye-opening to learn more from the comments that we received.
The proposal for our project wasn’t given from me, but I definitely felt that it resonated with what I believe interaction should be. Creating an educational product with the intention that people will learn from it while interacting with it fit my suggested definition above. The project would receive information from the user, process it within its system(while picking out what older extinct historical products it could use to teach with), express the idea that the user wanted to learn about it braille and give them new information on historical references and trivia.
I hope we handled the critique of our project well and I definitely learned a lot more about the progress of technology surrounding blind people and what they were in need of. I had a lot of fun working with my group members and writing the script for the little 5-minute presentation. Everyone worked hard on it and watching everyone else’s work on their own projects was a lot of fun as well!
Thank you!
Monika V. Yosifova