During the group project, I defined interaction as an activity where two actors are involved and both of them have effects on each other by a cycle of listening, processing and responding. During the process of interaction, the action of at least one actor should be made intentionally or purposefully, and the outcome should be entertaining or utilitarian.
After working on my midterm project and learning about Processing, I realize the limitation of including “two actors” in the definition. Our midterm project supports competition among players, which involves two people and one device. Therefore, the number of actors should be expanded to multiple instead of two. Besides, when learning basic Processing, we write programs that generate random outcomes without much entertainment or utility. However, we tried to explore the various functions by changing the parameters and testing the results, which can also be seen as a way of interaction. So the explorative purpose should be included as well.
One project that lines up with my definition is the Roskilde Festival playground. It uses gigantic projectors and a huge button as the physical interface in the zone, creating changing mazes of light and color. People can enjoy the combination of music and visual art or interact with the button to see how many possibilities the project has, which is an interesting exploration.
Based on it, I’d like to make a game as the final project that entertains people visually and aurally with some intellectual challenge.
On the contrary, the “Cindermedusae”, a generative book, does not align with my definition. It is a compilation of animation of virtual jellyfish generated from random parameters. Although the creatures are fascinating and vivid, they do not take external inputs and the audience are in the passive position. It is more like the artist’s exploration of artistic expressions instead of an interactive project.
Given all these new experiences and projects, I’d like to define interaction as the activity between at least two actors who affect others in a cycle of receiving input, processing and giving output, and it arouses people’s emotional or mental reactions. When interacting with machines, people should be in the active position and have at least partial control over the machine to figure out what may happen and what they are supposed to do even when they have no knowledge about it in the beginning.