The Art of Making the World React

AI monopolizes most discourse, crystallizes passions, and automates content generation. In parallel, another dimension, discrete by nature, enters the communication field: interaction. Indeed, while we produce more content today, ever more easily, a question arises: is content sufficient in itself? The answer lies in the interstices.

To understand the value of content, it must be analyzed through the lens of its popularity, the adherence it produces, and its capacity to retain those who consume it. This is what we call the "attention economy." This concept, formulated as early as 1971 by Nobel laureate Herbert Alexander Simon in Designing Organizations for an Information-Rich World, emphasizes that:

"In a world rich in information, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients." — Herbert A. Simon¹

Abundance paradoxically creates, in its wake, a shortage: that of attention. And this scarcity of attention makes it a central stake for businesses and media. This dynamic has a direct implication on how content is designed.

Beyond words, then images worth a thousand words, then videos proposing 24 images per second, a more dynamic format is making a comeback and a discipline is resurfacing: the design of interaction (Interactive eXperience Design, or IxD).

Interaction as the Ontological Foundation of Digital Systems

The history of interactive design dates back to the beginnings of personal computing, when clicking on an icon to launch an action was unprecedented. While the discipline formalized in the 1980s, its foundations plunge into ergonomics, cognitive psychology, and the first graphical programming languages. The expression "human-machine interface (HMI)," once useful but deemed too rigid, gradually gave way to "interactive design."

Graphic design deals with untangible and product design with materiality. Interactive design focuses on what happens in between. It comes to life in the transaction, in the response to a gesture.

In information sciences, this discipline refers to the design of interfaces capable of reacting to our actions, even creating a chain of useful and emotionally engaging micro-interactions. Interactive design thus rests on the trinity of user, interface, reaction. It's about establishing a dialogue between a machine and a human that generates satisfaction and captures attention. The goal is to make user action intuitive and reduce cognitive load.

The user has an expectation (for example, learning a language on a mobile app). Their actions are the trigger (here, the user answers questions) generating a response from the tool (auditory, visual, tactile activation, etc.) that stimulates the user and offers immediate reward.

Retaining Attention, Guiding the Gesture

In a saturated digital environment, beauty can capture attention but not necessarily retain it, as an interface can please the eye but confuse in use. It must therefore be designed to contextualize, streamline actions, and channel the gesture.

The playful dimension of reactions must create the desire to continue, discover, engage. By refining style and attraction elements, the interaction designer handles the junction of a dual requirement, functional and emotional.

Interactive design acts silently. Don Norman specifies in The Design of Everyday Things, "Good designs fit our needs so well that the design is invisible"³. The same applies to interaction design: it speaks to logic (what I understand) and intuition (what I feel).

Cognitive Architecture and Behavioral Nudge

Capturing attention occurs through the user's lived experience. Thus interactive design makes this cognitive mechanism the central object of its study and applications.

This paradigm opens a series of questions whose answers engage individuals, businesses, creators, and all communicators: how does interactive design influence our behavior? Can an interface encourage certain actions, even modify habits? How do we distinguish what pleases visually from what works durably? How do companies define their UX and IxD strategy? Finally, which technical solutions deliver on the promise of interactive design?

At the edge of semiotics, interactive design offers a choice architecture that focuses our attention and gently guides our decisions. Methods are multiple and subtle, and some use the nudge effect, this incentive method developed by 2017 Nobel Prize in Economics winner Richard Thaler⁴.

An animation, a vibration, a color, or a visual element can encourage us to navigate, click, swipe, play, consent.

Large organizations no longer conceive a product without integrating UX thinking from the earliest phases. This approach, derived from design thinking and inspired by agile methods, rests on a series of iterations: user research, journey testing, prototyping, measurement, then adaptation. It's about designing from usage before any aesthetic considerations.

IxD is now considered a performance indicator. A McKinsey study shows that companies most advanced in design outperform their competitors by 32% in revenue⁶. The stake is not just ergonomic, but strategic.

The Example of Rive Technology

The transition from intention to interaction requires adapted tools. Among them, the technology developed by Rive company offers a concrete response to IxD's promises. Unlike video formats or exported files, Rive allows creating graphic elements that react in real-time to user gestures. Animations are no longer played, they are interpreted on the fly by an engine integrated into the target application (video games, website, mobile app, touchscreen kiosk, vehicle dashboard, etc.).

Companies like Google, Canva, Dropbox, or Philips have integrated Rive into their production chain for its adaptability, lightweight file format, and the bridge it creates between design and development⁷.

Figma, Framer, or Protopie, digital creation tools, are essential in the prototyping phase. But their logic stops at simulation at best. Rive, on the other hand, produces operational elements. It allows animating, testing, and integrating without disruption. Interactive design finds a natural extension there, from sketch to runtime environment.

Toward an Ethics of Interaction

A profound transformation is underway: we're moving from a logic of broadcasting to a logic of transaction. Interactive design becomes the mediator of this new attention economy where value no longer resides in content but in the quality of the relationship it establishes.

If attention is the scarce currency, interactive design holds considerable power. It can emancipate or enslave. This questions our collective capacity to preserve autonomy of judgment in an environment designed to monopolize and speculate on attention value. The question is no longer technical, but ethical: what grammar of interaction do we want?

Interaction design engages a new responsibility: creating environments that stimulate without manipulating, that captivate without alienating. The ethics of interaction becomes a strategic imperative. Because interactive design is not a simple tool, it's the terrain where our freedom of attention is at stake.