Month: September 2015

Every morning, I walk past a Citi Bike station without thinking much of it.  I have heard many opinions on it but haven’t really put much thought into it until now.

Citi Bikes are a bike sharing program that allows a person to check out a bike for an allotment of time then return it to any other station.  Depending on the location of these, they can be used commuting or just touring the city.  Overall, the bikes are used as an alternative form of transportation to subways and cars and to owning a personal bike.  

The interactivity of these comes in two forms: the station itself and the app. The station has a screen that you touch and follow the steps to pay and unlock your bike from the station.  Although the steps are laid out on the station, there seemed to be a variety of issues when the users were interacting with it.  One user commented that it was confusing; however, I couldn’t tell at what part they were at when doing it.  Also, the taking of the bikes and placing things in the “basket” seemed difficult for users and became the longest part of the process.      

While the station had the user interacting physically with the bike, the other technical interaction comes from the app.  I didn’t see anyone using the app at the time but I know from researching that it can be used to locate a station and find out the availability of bikes.  I think the app can also easily show how Citi Bikes is a system in itself. As a bike is taken from one location, it is returned in another.

I think the interactivity of Citi Bikes comes from showing that it is a moving system and each user is playing a part in the movement when they check out and in a bike in different locations.  Also, the station has the person interacting on a digital as well as physical level.   However, this technology may go against the ideas presented in Norman’s and Crawford’s work because it only uses hands for the interface and doesn’t listen and think in the way Crawford imagines.

This week’s labs were a great refresher of my previous education in basic circuits.  However, I did run into a few issues when trying to create a basic switch application. My idea was to create two rings where one had an LED and the other was battery powered.  When they touched, the LED would light up.  This is a fairly basic concept but I discovered it was much more difficult to execute.  The original plan was to use rings and just attach the electronics. During the first attempt, the plan failed due to not having tape of any kind.  In the second attempt, the wire of the LED wasn’t long enough.  These two things lead to discovering the helpfulness of conductive tape in the situation. Below is the final solution.

There was an issue with keeping the batteries together.

Soldering would have been a better move but for now, a clothes pin kept them together tightly:

Questions: Is conductive tape always conductive on both sides?

Before reading Bret Victor’s  “A Brief Rant on the Future of Interaction Design” and Chris Crawford’s The Art of Interactive Design, I thought I had a good generic definition of interactivity.  In my mind it was when an action occurred between two objects and caused a reaction.   I think this goes along with Crawford’s idea of listening, thinking, and speaking. Although, I think I might be missing a clarifying statement about the listening of the second object.  According to Crawford, it appears that in order for a true interaction to happen, both “actors” need to listen to an action, think about it, and then thoughtfully speak about it.  The analogy of actors makes me realize that it is important to add communication into the definition when discussing technology. In addition, I really liked the idea of varying degrees of interactivity.  It’s something I have never thought about until now.  It makes me curious if there would be a way to quantify the interactivity of something. I think this is an important part that can be added to the definition. Finally, a key component of Victor’s piece was that interactivity isn’t just about finger touching a screen.  Victor points out that our hands are a one of a kind tool that we fail to use.  This could be taken even further to bring in all senses.
In general, I think I am now less clear on what is considered interactivity because I realized how broad it can be while still being narrow.

For the sake of this post, I will say that a possible definition of interactivity is a human creating a various level of reaction from a piece of technology by using one of the five senses, with a focus on touch, sight, and/or sound.  The only possible example I could come up with for digital technology without interaction is a digital billboard. You can see the information displayed but you can’t change them as the average person.