At this point in time, I have failed to consolidate an understanding of ‘interaction’ which is meaningful to me. Forget dissecting the word into constituents and battering it from every angle, I need a modern, concise, encompassing, and absolute understanding of this word, free of ambiguity and subjectiveness. It would be convenient, although unlikely, if this understanding became widespread, leading to a mutual agreement between designers, marketers, and the like, that interaction/interactivity was simply this. Of course, that kind of narrow-minded and absolute thinking makes the squarish buildings outside look even more square. We have been asked to describe what interactivity means to us. If you asked me to describe what ‘organic’, ‘green’, or ‘sustainability’ means to me, I would suffer a comparable frustration as these marketable words fall into a similar category as interaction; buzz words, ones which become used so often they act as a vague allusion rather than a real and meaningful word. Subjectiveness can be scary when it threatens our fundamental mode of communication, language. But as you can probably tell by now, I have diverged well off track and must realign my thoughts in order to accomplish the assingment in hand: What is interaction? I do, of course, have some vague impression of interaction, and it is this which I would like to share with you.
Likely, we can agree that the hype around interactivity emerged alongside digital technologies. Humans are spending a great deal of time engaged in technology and a word is needed to describe this engagement. We are not talking to technology (yet), we are simply communicating with it through various simple switched and sensors. We expect the technology to react to our input, and if it does not then of course ‘something must be broken’. It is a simple protocol between man and machine – man acts, technology reacts. This, in short, is my simplified understanding of interactivity.
I should also mention that this understanding of interactivity could become disused in the coming years as technology (AI, neurofeedback, voice recognition) becomes more intelligent and advanced.
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