An anatomy of interaction: co-occurrences and entanglements

Abstract

We present a new taxonomy for describing the conditions and implementation of interactions. Current mechanisms for embedding interaction in software promote a hard separation between the programmers who produce the software, and the communities who go on to use it. In order to support open ecologies of function and fabrication, where this separation is negotiated by communities of users and designers, we need to reconceive those mechanisms. We describe interaction in two phases: Co-occurrence, the prerequisite conditions for an interaction to take place; and entanglement, the temporary coupling and interplay between elements participating in the interaction. We then sketch a blueprint of a system where those phases and their adjacent mechanisms enable communities of users to build and use interactive software. There are many ways of conceiving this new design space, and we present three dominant metaphors which we have employed so far, based on chemical reactions, quantum physics and cooking. We exhibit different systems which we have implemented based on these metaphors, and sketch how future systems will further empower citizens to design and inhabit their own interactions, express ownership over them and share them with communities of interest. CCS CONCEPTS • Human-centered computing → Interaction paradigms; Interactive systems and tools;

Computers as Interactive Machines: Can We Build an Explanatory Abstraction?

“…The literature presents requirements to program and understand interactive systems (Suchman, 1987;Myers, 1994;Ko and Myers, 2004;Victor, 2012;Schmidt and Bansler, 2016;Hornbaek and Oulasvirta, 2017;Basman et al, 2018), studies the specific challenges encountered by programmers (Hill, 1986;Myers, 1991;Myers et al, 1994;Myers, 1994;Myers et al, 2000;Casiez and Roussel, 2011;Bainomugisha et al, 2013;Salvaneschi et al, 2015) and introduces diverse models to help programmers reason about their programs (Dearden and Harrison, 1997;Campos and Harrison, 1997;Navarre et al, 2006Navarre et al, , 2009Canny et al, 2019). However, some HCI researchers note that the appropriate level of abstraction to account for interactive systems is still missing:…”

“…The possibility of such causal relationships between processes is the mechanism to explain. The need for such an explanation has been pointed out in the literature, for example, in the "Anatomy of Interaction": "We believe that the major fault of current approaches to programming interactions is that they do not account for how interactions come to be" (Basman et al, 2018), or in the Reactive TM community: "In order to mimic site machines, a Turing machine must have a mechanism that will enable it to model the change of hardware or software by an operating agent" (Leeuwen and Wiedermann, 2001) (see Subsection 2.3).…”

“…An additional mechanism is required to convert physical quantities into digital data: transduction. The importance of transduction for interaction computing has already been commented on in theoretical computer science (Leeuwen and Wiedermann, 2006), the epistemology of computing (MacLennan, 2003), and HCI (Chatty, 1994;Accot et al, 1997;Navarre et al, 2009;Basman et al, 2018;Canny et al, 2019): "For computers and software to become mediators of human action, they need to be able to respond to the outside world. This is broadly the purpose of interactions as implemented in code: to transduce changes at some locations to changes at other locations" (Basman et al, 2018).…”

“…Others can have a more complex structure, such as the continuous evolution of a physical magnitude (light or temperature, for example). A fine-grained interactive system involves the programmer can easily connect and disconnect transduction sources (Basman et al, 2018).…”

“…From an epistemological point of view, these devices raise new challenges as they exhibit some properties that seem beyond the scope of the classical theory of computation. To understand what makes interactive computers special, we focus on a subset of interactive devices, namely those designed and studied by the Human-computer Interaction (HCI) community (Myers and Rosson, 1992;Beaudouin-Lafon, 2006;Myers et al, 2008;Hornbaek and Oulasvirta, 2017;Basman et al, 2018). Consider this simple example illustrated in Figure 1): a drawing application on a smartphone.…”