Response to The Art of Interactive Design: A Euphonious and Illuminating Guide to Building Successful Software by Chris Crawford, and A Brief Rant on the Future of Interaction Design by Bret Victor.
What is physical interaction?
Interaction is essentially two-way communication. Chris Crawford likened human-computer interaction to a conversation, breaking down the communication cycle into discrete parts: listening, thinking, and responding (input, process, and output, respectively). “Physical interaction” specifically emphasizes the listening and responding aspects of the cycle, as the only way to listen and respond is through some form of physical contact.
What makes for good physical interaction?
An important point Crawford makes regarding his definition of interaction is that not all interactions are created equal — there are varying degrees for which things are able to receive, process, and respond to given information effectively; some things are considered to have high interactivity while others low. Our current landscape of interactive tech is dominated mostly by the visual and less so the audible information in the form of “two-and-one-half dimensional” (as Crawford accurately poised the common display as “a stack of partially overlapping planar images”) UIs. Touch has also been a vital aspect of such software interaction, but still with extremely low interactivity according o Crawford’s logic. This is exactly the point designer Bret Victor makes in his famous A Brief Rant on the Future of Interaction Design essay — touch interactivity is abysmally low, while the emphasis on vision as the main communication medium is unwarranted. Victor points out the reality of how our senses function together: “when working with your hands, touch does the driving, and vision helps out from the back seat.” Instead, our hands (and, by extension, the rest of our bodies) are not nearly being used to their full potential.
Good physical interaction would be that which utilizes the human sensorium to its full potential, incorporating it as effectively as possible into the listening and responding aspects of the interaction cycle.
Does digital technology have anything new or revolutionary to offer which isn’t interactive?
I agree with Crawford’s statement that interactivity is software’s competitive advantage against other mediums, but digital technology as a whole has absolutely improved on the non-interactive mediums that predate it, through its fundamentally algorithmic properties. Its influence can be seen across the board, from music to visual art. It has also enabled various mediums to interact with one another in ways that weren’t necessarily able to be realized before.