Interactive Systems

A system is a group of entities that operate together in order to achieve a goal. IEEE: Electronic Terms defines a system as "a combination of components that act together to perform a function not possible with any of the individual parts".

A system can be interactive or non-interactive. An interactive system is one that interacts with other objects in the environment. These objects can be humans or mechanical- machinery. Although in the context of computers when we talk about interactive systems we usually mean a system that humans have to interact with in order to operate or control it.

Lets illustrate the above definition by giving some examples:

A chair is a system. It's made of components (legs, the seat, hand rests, back rest, screws, etc) that are combined together.

A normal chair is a non-interactive system. But an office chair is an interactive one. There are handles and other controls to interact with and control the state of the chair. Using the controls one can adjust the height, the titl, etc. This was a very basic example of an interactive system just to give you an idea of what an interactive system is.

Here's a more complex example:

A computer system. Again it's made of components that are combined together to achieve a goal.

A computer system that does the operation by itself without any inputs from other objects and without any sort of out put to the environment is a non-interactive computer (which I'm not aware of any!)

However, a normal desktop computer is an interactive one. The user uses the keyboard, mouse, etc to give inputs to the system. Monitor, printer, etc are used to see the outputs. Simply put, the user interacts with the computer.

The list of interactive systems go to more than thousands of goodies we all use in everyday life (microwaves, mobile phones, radios, to name a few). The aim of user experience designers is to make these devices more usable by having them designed in a more intuitive manner. I'm sure you all have had experiences of frustration and/or anger when you were not able to use a gadget. As the number of these devices are growing the main focus should be on making them more intuitive so the users can work with them more easily.

References:

[1] Wikipedia, Jan 08, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System