How Does Response Act as a Medium?

The projects that Myron Krueger describes in his article “Responsive Environments” are primarily all based on the phenomenon that a captivating responsive interaction can be enough on its own. The interaction itself does not need to be very sophisticated as long as the user feels that what he or she is doing is generating some form of an output that is responsive to his or her actions. One of the examples the author gives is his project “Metaplay”. In this project users would use their finger to draw lines which were actually generated by a computer. As it was very difficult to trace the shape of a person’s hand and finger, the actual line output was often not as accurate. However, because of this exciting type of interaction, users were so captivated that they wouldn’t notice the inaccuracy: “Happily, neither the artist nor the audience were concerned about the quality of the drawings. What was exciting was interacting in this novel way through a man-computer-video link spanning a mile” (Krueger 425). In my opinion, this example accurately describes how a response can act as a medium. It happens when the response itself is so novel and fascinating that it completely immerses the user into the interaction. The user then experiences something fully through interacting with the response of the system and having a two-way dialogue with it.

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