Recently, I wrote a column about convergence, the elusive fusion of many media technologies and good old-fashioned content. In it, I discussed convergence media’s struggle to find its own voice and real purpose from its infancy into its adolescence.
It occurs to me that interactivity, too, has traveled a similarly graveled road to maturity. It emerged with promises to revolutionize content deployment (if not our entire lives) with endless choice. Seize the controls–create your own ending! Have every movie ever made delivered to your computer screen 24/7! It became a kind of everything-all-the-time-just-the-way-you-want-it.com fantasy.
In the early days, interactivity was a form in search of a function. Investors threw money at it, networks started new divisions to investigate it, and tried and true entertainment companies, fearing for their viability, indulged in costly R&D just in case. Everyone seemed to forget the most basic principal of good design—"Form Follows Function." As it turned out, interactivity offered us new things to do, and new ways to do things without providing much of a motivation for doing them. Form without Function. Like caged hamsters on a wheel, we made the parts move, but didn’t get anywhere.
Laurie Anderson, who revolutionized pop music with her prescient explorations of digital music and culture once said, "Words like interactive make by skin crawl. To me interactive is listening to music, or reading, or seeing a dance, seeming something, anything, that changes your life or your mind. Interactive is not typing." She put her finger on the problem. Of course, we agreed with her so it became our humble mission to redefine what interactivity could be. The important thing was to find a way to marry the form and function—the how and the why bother of interaction.
Our goal for interactivity is to create living environments that eschewed the point and click paradigm in favor of exercising the eye and the mind. We designed reactive environments; otherwordly places rather than pages, mutable, but constant experiences that had a life of their own. To me, interactive really means engaging with your audience, immersing them psychologically in an experience.
After the cosmic humbling of last year, it seems like a good time to think about how interactivity might really serve us. In our current, "Reach-Out and Touch Someone" mood, integrating form and function might be a good way to enjoy a mature kind of interactivity—one that offers meaningful activity among participants and interplay between people and ideas.
We have several creative projects in development: a pre-school reading show based on animated storytelling and a program for working with at-risk children where they can talk to a cartoon about difficult social issues.
In classical dramatic interaction a leading character and a lead character engage in a dance of subjectivity; through this interplay of opposing viewpoints meaning is revealed. Hopefully, we can finally move towards interactivity as a dialogue between two active and engaged participants and move away from the simplistic notion of interactivity as "twitch fiber" action and response.
