Where did this “Interaction” come from?: A Brief History of Interaction Design
By: Mahan Mehrvarz
Tags: Responsive Design, Art, Ts, UX, Interaction Design

The major difference between interactive art tradition, reactive or responsive environment, and most happenings with a theatrical participatory theme was the leadership of artist in the participatory art forms versus the leadership of events (or machinery) in the interactive art projects. Soke Dinkla considered a socio-political layer in this form of art:

“The artistic material of interactive art is the automatized dialogue between program and user.” Interactive artworks provide a critical analysis of the automatized communication that is replacing inter-human relationships in more and more social fields. Thus the distribution of power between user and system is not just a technological issue but a social and political one as well.”

Interaction in the context of Space and Environment

Speaking of space and cybernetics indeed requires mentioning a landmark project by Cedric Price in early 1960s called the “Fun Palace”. In addition to the incorporation of basic laws of cybernetics, Price created a unique synthesis of a wide range of contemporary discourses of his time, such as information technology, game theory, and Situationism, to produce a new kind of “improvisational” architecture. The Fun Palace began as the collaboration between Price as an architect who valued the “inevitability of change, chance, and indeterminacy” of a human environment, and the avant-garde theater producer Joan Littlewood who dreamt of a kind of theater where people could experience the “transcendence and transformation” of the theater not as audience but as players. Fun Palace would have no singular program and could adapt its form to the “ever-changing and unpredictable”, ad-hoc program that would be determined by the users. In Fun Palace, in contrast to the conventional practice of architecture, the architect typically stated problems in terms of permittivity, that is, in terms of events rather than of objects.

Fun Palace by Cedric Price

When the approach of the Fun Palace gradually shifted from theatrical ideas toward cybernetics, the project planners placed more importance on mathematical models based on statistics, psychology, and sociology. Later on, Gordon Pask, participated in the project as the head of cybernetic committee. Even Price hoped that computer programs would relocate the movable walls and walkways to adapt the layout of Fun Palace according to changes in use. The Fun Palace was never completed. Though unbuilt, the Fun Palace was widely admired and imitated, especially by the young architecture students who formed the core of the avant-garde Archigram group.

Plug-in city by Archigram

Archigram was a magazine, backed by a group of architects and designers, published in nine issues during the 1960s. The name of the magazine is a hybrid of the words “Architecture” and “Telegram”. Each issue was also a hybrid that crossed between structure and communication. The magazine is now considered as a reaction to the emergence of “electronically driven technologies within the popular domain of consumer products and services.” Archigram provided images ranging from system design to cybernetic planning.

Walking city by Archigram

Their most notable works included Plug-In City and Walking City. In Plug-In City Peter Cook proposed a city that consists of a permanent infrastructure and circulation network with temporary spaces and services that could be added to or removed from it. The proposal addressed the urban problems such as population growth, traffic, and land use by considering the whole city as a system. Herron’s walking City , Consists of a giant walking structure, potentially for a post-nuclear war human settlement. These structures would be able to connect to one another or to a network of circulation infrastructure in order to exchange passengers/dwellers and goods.

Mark Weiser coined the term “Ubiquitous Computing“ in 1988. Using the example of writing as the first information technology that stores spoken language for long run, he described that the “literacy technology” products have a constant presence in the background. While they do not require an active attention, “the information to be transmitted is ready for use in a glance”.

Weiser recognized the Silicon-based technologies (of the time) far from this concept. He proposed that the ubiquitous computers are constantly running invisible, none-intrusive, and on the background of everyday life and woven into its fabric. It is important to understand that the locus of this concept is that with network-connected devices, information will be available everywhere because people do not put information on their devices, instead their devices will be put on a network of information. He emphasizes that the power of this concept does not come from any one of these devices, but the intersection of many of them.

Ubiquitous computing takes the social layer of human environments into account. later on, emerged the design of embedded (as opposed to only portable), location-aware, situated (as opposed to universal), and adapted (as opposed to uniform) systems.

Malcolm McCullough in his book digital ground states:

“When most of objects boot up and link to networks designers have to understand the landscape of technology enough in order to take a position about the design of them.”

A major contribution of ubiquitous computing was the changes it introduced to computer interfaces. Malcolm McCullough suggests that Ubiquitous computing is far from a portable or mobile form of computing since it is embedded in the spaces we live in. He advocates for a new pervasive, location aware computing to replace the existing desktop computer. This new computing “emerge[s] on the assumption that what you need, and with whom you wish to be connected at the moment, is based on where you are.”

McCullough also proposes the elements through which this new form of computing can be made possible. These elements consist of microprocessors, sensors for detecting the action, communication links between the devices, tags to identify the actors, and actuators to close the feedback loop. He also suggests controllers, displayers, location tracking devices, and software components to complete the set of components needed for pervasive computing.

In the 1970s, Nickolas Negroponte spoke of various aspects of the arousing discourse of designer-machine dialogue and its several byproducts that had emerged during late 1960s and early 1970s in the field of architecture and urbanism such as; “flexible”, “adaptive”, ”reactive”, ”responsive”, and ”manipulative” [styles or approaches to architecture]. His project “SEEK” was a manifesto exhibition/installation that initiated the notion of digital assemblage in architecture. He considered a boundary between two types of interaction; one is passive and “manipulative” which is “moved as opposed to move” and in contrast, the other one is responsive in which the environment takes an active role as a result of a computational process. Negroponte went far beyond the simple feedback loop in what is conventionally known as a control system. His responsive architecture moves toward artificial intelligence in the sense that it has intentions and contextualized cognition with the capability of dynamically changing its goals. In his book; “Soft Architecture Machines”, Negroponte proposes a model of architecture without architects. He puts architecture machines beyond some aids in the process of designing buildings. Instead, in his view they serve as buildings themselves; intelligent machines or cognitive physical environments that respond to their inhabitants’ immediate needs and wishes.