A. Trip to CAC
We visited the Chronus Art Centre at ShangHai PuTuo District MoGanMountain Road No. 50 on 2019-10-26. The architecture complex where the centre’s located is a hub of magnificent contemporary arts. The centre exhibits new-technology-based pieces. Only the first piece we observed was interactive and playful. The latter pieces are philosophically valuable, and most of them exhibit themes of computer science. Later, we visited other art galleries as well. There were also new tech ones, apart from traditional galleries. One notable point that those new tech ones are distinct is that their pieces seem alive! Arthur Ganson’s “Beholding the Big Bang” in CAC is a series of gear wheels that each spins slower than the next, to accomplish which requires accurate programing and control. Even though it’s not responding to us, let alone interacting, it’s a smart unit that operates on its own. Another gallery that features electronic screens paneled in a painting to make it dynamic, and some can even interact with the viewer with the help of the pieces’ video cameras. They are lively compared to static traditional art pieces.
B. 2 Prjct Found on Creatv App Ntwrk
Player presses each panel in the canvas to change the color and creates a painting. It’s a good interaction, one feature of which is that a more tough thing can be presented and accessed in an easier way. Painting traditionally isn’t easy to commoners, but this device makes an ordinary player a painter.
Click Canvas: https://www.creativeapplications.net/member-submissions/click-canvas/
Operation on the steer exhibits bunches of lousy mathematic formulas easy and tangible. It’s highly interactive due to the same reason as that canvas project.
C. Def of Interaction and Features of Interaction and Good Interaction
- Def
- Interaction is the iterative progression of the action and reaction between two units.
- Since the group project, my definition for interaction hasn’t changed at all, but there’re restrictions to call an interaction a good one.
- A kind of broad Interaction is the interaction among players, which is originally the set of interactions between each player and a common medium.
- I proposed the definition for that high order interaction in midterm, taking soccer players and soccer ball as an example.
- Interaction is the iterative progression of the action and reaction between two units.
- Features of Interaction
- Dynamic
- Any interactive piece has “life”. The inspiration from my visit to CAC suggests that a dynamic piece will feel as if alive to people, whether it’s interacting with the player or it’s just a self-running non-responsive piece like “Beholding the Big Bang”.
- Two-Directional
- I got the idea “two-directional” during the group project. DogLar, the multifunctional dog collar wasn’t all about interaction. It detects the dog’s conditions and responds to them. Like when it inspects the dog’s hunger, it opens the dispenser and feeds the dog. And it stops feeding just because it physically detects that the dog is full. How the dog becomes full is by digestion. The dog, its mind, its soul, doesn’t feedback DogLar. When the dog thinks “I’m hungry. I’m supposed to eat.” That’s the mind.
- Dynamic
- Features of Good Interaction
- Instant
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- If it’s dynamic, why not instant, so as to be a good interaction? Below are two aspects.
- I got the idea “instant” during the group project. We refer to a stupid student as a slow learner. A machine is dumb if it takes lots of time to react.
- Another reason why instant is that when we interact with machines, human reaction is often a whim in the mind. If the machine is slow, it fades away and fails to turn into our reactive behavior.
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- User-Friendly
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- If it’s two-directional, why not user-friendly, so as to be a good interaction Below are two aspects.
- Making Tough Things Easy and Accessible
- As the two projects in part B suggest, an interactive piece can function so that a difficult thing can be exhibited or achieved in an easy way. Without that piece, the player will pay too much attention to accomplish the tough task to promote other aspects. Like the click canvas, it makes painting easier and thus inspires the ordinary to be good painters. Unlike the canvas which’s interactive, the maths triangle table is responsive, but it still helps a learner grasp the knowledge deeper.
- Reasonable
- In midterm, we knew that a design should be such that once one who’s never known the design observes it, she will soon find out how to work with it. The design should cater for human logic, taking the push-pull door as an example mentioned in class. Reasonability is part to be user-friendly.
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- Instant