Interactive design

Interactive Design is defined as a user-oriented field of study that focuses on meaningful communication of media through cyclical and collaborative processes between people and technology. Successful interactive designs have simple, clearly defined goals, a strong purpose and intuitive screen interface.

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 meaningful uses of hardware and systems and that Interaction Design is the design of those hardware and systems. Interaction Design without Interactive Design provides only hardware or an interface. Interactive Design without Interaction Design cannot exist for there is no platform for it to be used by 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.

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.

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 the communication between people and people. In other words, everyone can readily communicate and interact 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 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 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.

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