Interactive Excellence: Defining and Developing New Standards for the Twenty-First Century

THE LIBRARY OF CONTEMPORARY THOUGHT
"The audience for everything has grown in size, and the number of experiences to watch has grown even more rapidly. These two factors mean that the nature of the audience must change. When that occurs, our current standards of excellence need to be rethought and redefined. New standards our grandparents could not have imagined need to be developed. . . ."
--from Interactive Excellence        

INTERACTIVE EXCELLENCE
Defining and Developing New Standards for the Twenty-first Century

"Gertrude Stein said that 'great art is irritation.' Mosquitoes irritate us, as do certain sounds and images. But does that make fingernails dragging across a blackboard art? Hardly. If something awakens us, moves us, transforms us, makes us feel and think in a new way, makes itself a part of us, that is a measure of greatness. Great art is what challenges us to see ourselves and each other more clearly. Great art makes us understand our relationship to the world we are in. Sometimes to change how we think we must look from a new perspective. Irritation makes us move away from our comfortable way of looking--and our comfortable way of creating art. A movie like The Graduate or a book like The Grapes of Wrath stimulates us--irritates us, in a way--to become part of a conversation, with others and within ourselves, about who, how, why, where, and when we are. . . ."

Edwin Schlossberg has a Ph.D. in science and literature from Columbia University. He is the author of several books, including WORDSWORDSWORDS, a collection of poetry. He is coauthor of The Philosopher's Game, The Home Computer Handbook, and The Pocket Calculator Game Book. He founded Edwin Schlossberg Incorporated in 1978, a multi-disciplinary design firm that specializes in interactive design for public places. He lives in New York City with his family.