My thought of interaction is the independent response from one object, being a program or any living organism with independence of thought. Both objects, programs, etc. must respond to each other without significant control or interruption from outside forces for interaction to happen. I researched two applications that help with daily life to make this comparison more clear. The first, Circlo, is an iPhone app that changes general ambient music depending on the time of the day and weather. The second, Daytum, collects data on your daily physical activites like breathing patterns or running steps. Circlo is the more interactive application because it changes depending on what time of day it is. It responds to what time of day it is by playing a different ambient music, while Daytum just collects data on what you do.
There is little interaction on Daytum’s part because it collects data but does nothing using the data, while Circlo collects data on the time of day and reacts by playing different music. Circlo therefore fits the definition more because the app interacts with the weather and time of day. The time of day is systematic, but the weather may be unpredicatable in the program of the Circlo. Therefore two independent things (the weather and the type of music exhibited through the application) interact with one another. For Daytum, the data is dependent on what acitivites you pursue during the day.
Daytum looks like:
Circlo looks like: (it produces music)
For our next generation model that fits in 2119, we created the Knowledge Transmittor v. 2. The Knowledge Transmittor is supposed to connect your brain and a large database with an earpiece and the machine itself. It then transmits any knowledge you can pick from to your brain. This includes books, recipes, or any sort of text. The downside is that you forget all this information within a month (to have an extremely high returning customer ratio).
It fits the idea of interaction as it puts into your brain whichever book or recipe you want it to. I feel like this is more on the dependent side, but there is still a possible independent reaction as it could fry your brain or input the text. (It was described that version 1 fried the brain of a poor individual). Your decision to choose which book or recipe is the independent part though, as you have millions of choices to choose from.
We got this idea from just thinking of how hard classes are and how much reading we have to do. If all of this could be put in your brain in seconds, than it would be much more convenient for students. This idea was a great one to introduce and perform, and we found it interesting in every aspect.
Citation:
Crawford, “What Exactly is Interactivity,” The Art of Interactive Design, pp. 1-5.