As readers of this blog are well aware, HCI is at an interesting cross-roads. The history of the discipline is fundamentally scientific, with primary inputs from psychology and computer science. The future of the discipline appears minimally to include cultural, with the rise of affective, entertainment, domestic, social, and other culturally dense forms of computing.…
This morning I finally got around to watching the much vaunted Second Skin trailer about MMORPGs. I feel that the framing of the whole thing is wrong. Though virtual worlds have objective dimensions (the code, the UI, the subscribers, the paratext–by which I mean forums, blogs, guild sites, etc.), “virtual world” is also an intellectual…
One problem that is likely impeding the development of critical approaches in HCI is equivocation. Equivocation occurs when different meanings or uses of the same word are used interchangeably. “Criticism” appears to be just such a word, and the origin of this post was to offer some fundamental distinctions among different uses of “criticism” in…
I just received a CFP for a special issue on “enculturating HCI.” Now, “enculturating” is a rather strange word, which I will talk more about below, but for now let me at least say what it seems to mean in this CFP: “making HCI cultural.” Here is the intro: We are living in a globalized…
I’m at a workshop on critical theory and HCI, and one of the participants asked the group to try to articulate what critical theory gets us. People had some very thoughtful reactions and elaborated complex responses. But I had a simpler response. I had been taking notes from people’s talks in the morning, and I…
Shaowen Bardzell (my illustrious collaborator and spouse) and I recently wrote an article entitled, “Intimate Interactions: Online Representation and Software of the Self,” which has just been published in Interactions magazine. In it, we argue that online representations do not always represent our offline selves, and it is a mistake to think they should always…
Here are some juicy quotes by French New Wave filmmaker and critic Godard on the relationship between criticism and filmmaking. As a critic, I already thought of myself as a filmmaker. Today [1962, after he started directing films] I still consider myself a critic, and in a sense, I’m even more of one than before.…
A recent trip to California left me inside of airplanes long enough to watch Godard‘s 1960 film Breathless. This film was enormously influential for its in-your-face style, which flaunted the “rules” of editing and made Godard an overnight sensation. One often hears of film editing as an invisible art, that is, when done well, you…
Readings: Going Off on Your Own Continued from Part 6 of the Interaction Criticism series, which starts here. Acknowledgment: Many of the ideas and readings cited throughout this series and particularly in this post reflect the research and contributions of my colleague and spouse, Shaowen Bardzell. I certainly have enjoyed composing this series of posts,…
I realized tonight, on a walk with my spouse, that much of what I am doing this summer is documenting the epistemology of criticism. In other words, I am trying to render explicit the ways that critics come to know whatever it is that they come to know, and to compare that with how social…
Interaction Culture 