Drag Box 01

Click and drag the box.

The qualities of a manipulable form should be able to vary at the creator’s discretion, in other words they should be ‘manipulable’ by both the general and my specific definition. It should also be possible for manipulable qualities to change while the artifact is being used.

The most trivial example would be a box that may be clicked and dragged. The form’s position is intentionally changed by user input; while other input (press and hold) intentionally changes whether the mapping of that manipulation is nullified. In this example two different inputs are used to manipulate two different qualities. Just as the same input might be drive the change of multiple cursors, it should be able to drive both a manipulation and the manipulation of that manipulation, a meta-manipulation of sorts. As such it should be possible for the dragging a box to effect how it may be dragged. A kind of interface widget with behavior dependent on its own settings. A simple example is drag box 01, where mouse input determines both the position of the box and also the actualization of this relationship.

The result is aesthetically banal, but it’s important that any definition should support a variety of behaviors. This behavior alone may be described, computationally, in many ways. This description of the interactive behavior may not occur to a user, but may yet be understood once explained.