Interactive design is a user-oriented field of study that focuses on meaningful communication using media to create products through cyclical and collaborative processes between people and technology. Successful interactive designs have simple, clearly defined goals, a strong purpose and intuitive screen interface. [1] [2] [3]
In some cases interactive design is equated to interaction design; however, in the specialized study of interactive design there are defined differences. To assist in this distinction, interaction design can be thought of as:
Whereas interactive design can be thought of as:
While both definitions indicate a strong focus on the user, the difference arises from the purposes of interactive design and interaction design. In essence interactive design involves the creation of interactive products and services, while interaction design focuses on the design of those products and services. [15] Interaction design without interactive design provides only design concepts. Interactive design without interaction design may not built products good enough for the user.
Interactive Design is heavily influenced by the Fluxus movement, which focuses on a "do-it-yourself" aesthetic, anti-commercialism and an anti-art sensibility. Fluxus is different from Dada in its richer set of aspirations. Fluxus is not a modern-art movement or an art style, rather it is a loose international organization which consists of many artists from different countries. There are 12 core ideas that form Fluxus. [16] [17] [18]
The birth of the personal computer gave users the ability to become more interactive with what they were able to input into the machine. This was mostly due to the invention of the mouse. With an early prototype created in 1963 by Douglas Engelbart, the mouse was conceptualized as a tool to make the computer more interactive. [19]
With the tendency of increasing use to the Internet, the advent of interactive media and computing, and eventually the emergence of digital interactive consumer products, the two cultures of design and engineering gravitated towards a common interest in flexible use and user experience. The most important characteristic of the Internet is its openness to communication between people and people. In other words, everyone can readily communicate and interact with what they want on the Internet. Recent century, the notion of interactive design started popularity with Internet environment. Stuart Moulthrop was shown interactive media by using hypertext, and made genre of hypertext fiction on the Internet. Stuart philosophies could be helpful to the hypertext improvements and media revolution with developing of the Internet. This is a short history of Hypertext. In 1945, the first concept of Hypertext had originated by Vannevar Bush as he wrote in his article As We May Think. And a computer game called Adventure was invented as responding users' needs via the first hypertextual narrative in the early 1960s. And then Douglas Engelbart and Theodor Holm Nelson who made Xanadu collaborated to make a system called FRESS in the 1970's. Their efforts brought immense political ramifications. By 1987, Computer Lib and Dream Machine were published by Microsoft Press. And Nelson joined Autodesk, which announced plans to support Xanadu as a commercial. The definition of Xanadu is a project that has declared an improvement over the World Wide Web, with mission statement that today's popular software simulates paper. The World Wide Web trivializes our original hypertext model with one-way ever-breaking links and no management of version or contents. In the late 1980s, Apple computer began giving away Hypercard. Hypercard is relatively cheap and simple to operate. In the early 1990s, the hypertext concept has finally received some attention from humanist academics. We can see the acceptance through Jay David Bolters ' Writing Space (1991)', and George Landow's Hypertext. [20] [21]
Upon the transition from analogue to digital technology, one sees a further transition from digital technology to interactive media in advertising agencies. This transition caused many of the agencies to reexamine their business and try to stay ahead of the curve. Although it is a challenging transition, the creative potential of interactive design lies in combining almost all forms of media and information delivery: text, images, film, video and sound, and that in turn negates many boundaries for advertising agencies, making it a creative haven.[ citation needed ]
Hence, with this constant motion forward, agencies such as R/GA have established a routine to keep up. Founded in 1977 by Richard and Robert Greenberg, the company has reconstructed its business model every nine years. Starting from computer-assisted animation camera, it is now an "Agency for the Digital World". Robert Greenberg explains: "the process of changing models is painful because you have to be ready to move on from the things that you're good at". This is one example of how to adapt to such a fast-paced industry, and one major conference that stays on top of things is the How Interactive Design Conference, which helps designers make the leap towards the digital age. [22] [23] [24] [25]
Nowadays, following the development of science and technology, various new media appear in different areas, like art, industry and science. Most technologies described as "new media" are digital, often having characteristics of being manipulated, networkable, dense, compressible, and interactive (like the internet, video games and mobiles). In the industry field, companies no longer focus on products itself, they focus more on human-centered design. Therefore, "interactive" become an important element in the new media. Interactivity is not only computer and video signal presenting with each other, but it should be more referred to communication and respondence among viewers and works.
According to Selnow's (1988) theory, interactivity has three levels:
New media has been described as the "mixture between existing cultural conventions and the conventions of software. For instance newspapers and television, they have been produced from traditional outlets to forms of interactive multimedia." New media can allow audiences access to content anytime, anywhere, on any digital device. It also promotes interactive feedback, participation, and community creation around the media content.
New media is a vague term to mean a whole slew of things. The Internet and social media are both forms of new media. Any type of technology that enables digital interactivity is a form of new media. Video games, as well as Facebook, would be a great example of a type of new media.[ citation needed ] New media art is simply art that utilizes these new media technologies, such as digital art, computer graphics, computer animation, virtual art, Internet art, and interactive art. New media art is very focused on the interactivity between the artist and the spectator. [27]
Many new media art works, such as Jonah Brucker-Cohen and Katherine Moriwaki's UMBRELLA.net and Golan Levin et al.'s Dialtones: A Telesymphony, [28] involve audience participation. Other works of new media art require audience members to interact with the work but not to participate in its production. In interactive new media art, the work responds to audience input but is not altered by it. Audience members may click on a screen to navigate through a web of linked pages, or activate motion sensors that trigger computer programs, but their actions leave no trace on the work itself. Each member of the audience experiences the piece differently based on the choices he or she makes as while interacting with the work. In Olia Lialina's My Boyfriend Came Back From The War , for example, visitors click through a series of frames on a Web page to reveal images and fragments of text. Although the elements of the story never change, the way the story unfolds is determined by each visitor's own actions. [29] [30]
Hypertext is text displayed on a computer display or other electronic devices with references (hyperlinks) to other text that the reader can immediately access. Hypertext documents are interconnected by hyperlinks, which are typically activated by a mouse click, keypress set, or screen touch. Apart from text, the term "hypertext" is also sometimes used to describe tables, images, and other presentational content formats with integrated hyperlinks. Hypertext is one of the key underlying concepts of the World Wide Web, where Web pages are often written in the Hypertext Markup Language (HTML). As implemented on the Web, hypertext enables the easy-to-use publication of information over the Internet.
Multimedia is a form of communication that uses a combination of different content forms such as text, audio, images, animations, or video into a single interactive presentation, in contrast to traditional mass media, such as printed material or audio recordings, which features little to no interaction between users. Popular examples of multimedia include video podcasts, audio slideshows and animated videos. Multimedia also contains the principles and application of effective interactive communication such as the building blocks of software, hardware, and other technologies. The five main building blocks of multimedia are text, image, audio, video, and animation.
Interactive art is a form of art that involves the spectator in a way that allows the art to achieve its purpose. Some interactive art installations achieve this by letting the observer walk through, over or around them; others ask the artist or the spectators to become part of the artwork in some way.
New media are communication technologies that enable or enhance interaction between users as well as interaction between users and content. In the middle of the 1990s, the phrase "new media" became widely used as part of a sales pitch for the influx of interactive CD-ROMs for entertainment and education. The new media technologies, sometimes known as Web 2.0, include a wide range of web-related communication tools such as blogs, wikis, online social networking, virtual worlds, and other social media platforms.
Interaction design, often abbreviated as IxD, is "the practice of designing interactive digital products, environments, systems, and services." While interaction design has an interest in form, its main area of focus rests on behavior. Rather than analyzing how things are, interaction design synthesizes and imagines things as they could be. This element of interaction design is what characterizes IxD as a design field, as opposed to a science or engineering field.
Across the many fields concerned with interactivity, including information science, computer science, human-computer interaction, communication, and industrial design, there is little agreement over the meaning of the term "interactivity", but most definitions are related to interaction between users and computers and other machines through a user interface. Interactivity can however also refer to interaction between people. It nevertheless usually refers to interaction between people and computers – and sometimes to interaction between computers – through software, hardware, and networks.
Visualization or visualisation is any technique for creating images, diagrams, or animations to communicate a message. Visualization through visual imagery has been an effective way to communicate both abstract and concrete ideas since the dawn of humanity. Examples from history include cave paintings, Egyptian hieroglyphs, Greek geometry, and Leonardo da Vinci's revolutionary methods of technical drawing for engineering and scientific purposes.
Digitality is used to mean the condition of living in a digital culture, derived from Nicholas Negroponte's book Being Digital in analogy with modernity and post-modernity.
Human-centered computing (HCC) studies the design, development, and deployment of mixed-initiative human-computer systems. It is emerged from the convergence of multiple disciplines that are concerned both with understanding human beings and with the design of computational artifacts. Human-centered computing is closely related to human-computer interaction and information science. Human-centered computing is usually concerned with systems and practices of technology use while human-computer interaction is more focused on ergonomics and the usability of computing artifacts and information science is focused on practices surrounding the collection, manipulation, and use of information.
Interactive media normally refers to products and services on digital computer-based systems which respond to the user's actions by presenting content such as text, moving image, animation, video and audio. Since its early conception, various forms of interactive media have emerged with impacts on educational and commercial markets. With the rise of decision-driven media, concerns surround the impacts of cybersecurity and societal distraction.
Ben Shneiderman is an American computer scientist, a Distinguished University Professor in the University of Maryland Department of Computer Science, which is part of the University of Maryland College of Computer, Mathematical, and Natural Sciences at the University of Maryland, College Park, and the founding director (1983-2000) of the University of Maryland Human-Computer Interaction Lab. He conducted fundamental research in the field of human–computer interaction, developing new ideas, methods, and tools such as the direct manipulation interface, and his eight rules of design.
Strictly, digital theatre is a hybrid art form, gaining strength from theatre's ability to facilitate the imagination and create human connections and digital technology's ability to extend the reach of communication and visualization.
Computer-supported collaborative learning (CSCL) is a pedagogical approach wherein learning takes place via social interaction using a computer or through the Internet. This kind of learning is characterized by the sharing and construction of knowledge among participants using technology as their primary means of communication or as a common resource. CSCL can be implemented in online and classroom learning environments and can take place synchronously or asynchronously.
Affective design describes the design of user interfaces in which emotional information is communicated to the computer from the user in a natural and comfortable way. The computer processes the emotional information and adapts or responds to try to improve the interaction in some way. The notion of affective design emerged from the field of human–computer interaction (HCI), specifically from the developing area of affective computing. Affective design serves an important role in user experience (UX) as it contributes to the improvement of the user's personal condition in relation to the computing system. The goals of affective design focus on providing users with an optimal, proactive experience. Amongst overlap with several fields, applications of affective design include ambient intelligence, human–robot interaction, and video games.
User experience design is the process of defining the experience a user would go through when interacting with a company, its services, and its products. Design decisions in UX design are often driven by research, data analysis, and test results rather than aesthetic preferences and opinions. Unlike user interface design, which focuses solely on the design of a computer interface, UX design encompasses all aspects of a user's perceived experience with a product or website, such as its usability, usefulness, desirability, brand perception, and overall performance. UX design is also an element of the customer experience (CX), which encompasses all aspects and stages of a customer's experience and interaction with a company.
Participatory culture, an opposing concept to consumer culture, is a culture in which private individuals do not act as consumers only, but also as contributors or producers (prosumers). The term is most often applied to the production or creation of some type of published media.
In the context of e-learning, interactivity is defined as "the function of input required by the learner while responding to the computer, the analysis of those responses by the computer, and the nature of the action by the computer."
Hands-on computing is a branch of human-computer interaction research which focuses on computer interfaces that respond to human touch or expression, allowing the machine and the user to interact physically. Hands-on computing can make complicated computer tasks more natural to users by attempting to respond to motions and interactions that are natural to human behavior. Thus hands-on computing is a component of user-centered design, focusing on how users physically respond to virtual environments.
Human–computer interaction (HCI) is research in the design and the use of computer technology, which focuses on the interfaces between people (users) and computers. HCI researchers observe the ways humans interact with computers and design technologies that allow humans to interact with computers in novel ways. A device that allows interaction between human being and a computer is known as a "Human-computer Interface (HCI)".
Sonic interaction design is the study and exploitation of sound as one of the principal channels conveying information, meaning, and aesthetic/emotional qualities in interactive contexts. Sonic interaction design is at the intersection of interaction design and sound and music computing. If interaction design is about designing objects people interact with, and such interactions are facilitated by computational means, in sonic interaction design, sound is mediating interaction either as a display of processes or as an input medium.
Interplay-Interactive-Design-V-Contemporary.