TopDiscovering The Interactive Texture
While I have in this book addressed the different ways in which we might be able to “read” and “write” these new textures, we still have not come down to the ultimate question of how to discover them as embedded in the materials of our physical surrounding.
As these new materials will start to find their way out in the physical environment it will probably be a phase in which these interactive textures will be quite easy to discover for two different reasons. First, it is likely that the digital technology will not be fully mature and will be rather clumsy (or in other terms not fully texturized in relation to other materials) meaning that for technical reasons such new textures will be rather easy to recognize. These installations will also be quite rare meaning that we will probably know where these installations are made. At the other hand of the spectrum we find the fully matured textures. These textures are also easy to recognize since they are elegantly aligned with the purpose they fulfill, with the other materials from which they are realized, and with appropriate interaction modalities associated with them. However, in the development from early clumsy prototypes to the future of interactive textures we will probably struggle to discover interactive textures, and if we do, we might run into various troubles related to understanding how to access, operate and make meaningful use out of them.