What is the relationship between interaction and thought? Consider how you would bake a cake. You're in the kitchen and have the recipe on your iPad. You can read it without scrolling or even squinting. So why do you point at the screen? Why do you mutter that you need three cups of flour? Why do you arrange the ingredients on the table in a certain way? All the information you need is visible. All the ingredients are ready to hand. So why all these superfluous interactions? More importantly, why do we see these things in everything from baking a cake to playing Tetris to analysing data on sticky notes?
Deep interaction is the idea that how we interact with the world is tightly coupled to how we think. We interact to make meaning, develop understanding, and create insight. This does not happen just in our heads. We do not simply look at the world and think. Karl call's this deep interaction because it involves a complex connection between mind, body, and world. Interaction is more than clicking pixels.
Karl will explore the contours of deep interaction and examine its implications as we move from a world of keyboards and mice to a world of touch, gesture, and beyond.
Karl Fast is a professor of User Experience Design at Kent State University. He studies how people interact with information as they try to make sense of their world. Especially in a digital world, where information is an abundant resource, and our interactive technologies are becoming more powerful and more nuanced. He studies how we think by interacting with our environment and what this means for designing the digital future.
Karl is a founding member of the Information Architecture Institute.
