We talk about interactivity all the time. In stage art, popularity of a performance is measured by how much percent of the show are designed to realize through a collaboration with the audience, or unintentionally arouse their response; in sale promotions, a good salesperson knows exactly how to target at the customer’s desire, thus encouraging them to ask more and be more interested into the subject; a class is considered lively when the teacher constantly throws questions and games that get the recipients of knowledge- the kids- involved in the activity. In the era of machine &artificial intelligence, human/computer interactivity is also under the spotlight. The word, again, becomes a key index in evaluating how “user-friendly” a product is. But what exactly is interactivity?
Interaction is, according to Crawford, a cyclic process in which two actors alternately listen, think, and speak. We have the keywords here: bidirectional, engagement, connection. A conversation is a type of interaction; a badminton game as well. That means the process only matches its name when there is more than one participant, and only goes into effect when the players constantly produce inputs into the system, and reacts to the inputs of the other(s), which becomes the new input, that keeps the system circulate. At a word, a kind of action that occurs as two or more objects have an effect upon one another.
The idea of a two-way effect is essential in the concept of interaction, as opposed to a one-way causal effect. A branch is not interactive because it only responds to a turbulence, but never gives back. Similarly, light on of the fridge when penning up the fridge door is merely respondent. …But, what if we all have our own definition of interactivity? One may find a PS4 interactive; while others may find talking to a rock interactive! How do we cope with that?
I find myself in a blind alley, until Crawford’s book urges me to think about it from another perspective. Instead of a binary concept to be “interactive or not”, he turns the “yes and no” question to a “measure” of a variable, of which the value falls in a range, instead of a certain point. I think “interactivity” is exactly “of how much interaction”, the level, degree, or the intensity of interaction involved. Simple, but smart!
Keeping this in mind, debates like “is this interactive or not?” become unnecessary and absurd. Next time when examining how interactive a product is, we could ask ourselves: is this degree of interaction enough that it make me feel like it is some “one” I can communicate with? This is important to understand because in designs one is also expected to avoid the plausible traps.