I’m so excited to share that my new book, co-edited with Shaowen Bardzell and Mark Blythe and entitled Critical Theory and Interaction Design, is now available. After discussing the need for such a book for years, we finally moved forward when we came upon a cool concept for it: we’d invite leading HCI researchers to identify…
Read more Critical Theory and Interaction Design (MIT Press) is Available!
Jeffrey Bardzell Indiana University (version: August 2018) [Background: This is a handout for MS HCI/d students that I’ve been iteratively working on for a decade or so. Given the recent interest in this topic–see, e.g., howtocrit.com–I’ve decided to make it publicly available.] Introduction As both design practitioners and everyday citizens, we all critique. We do…
One comment I hear from the HCI and design communities–from students and senior researchers alike–is the assumption that criticality is negative, that the role of a critique is to “destroy” something, or that critics just dump on the hard work of others. I want to push back against this idea, and I will explain why…
In a 2017 paper, Forlizzi, Koskinen, Hekkert, and Zimmerman called for a “divorce” between “pragmatic” and “critical” threads of “constructive design research” or CDR. At DIS 2018, they have a workshop around the theme of the paper. (Full disclosure: they invited me and my frequent coauthor Shaowen Bardzell to co-organize it, which we would have…
Read more Design Researchers Need a Shared Program, Not a Divorce
Why do we as researchers turn away from accepted knowledge, theory, and/or research? I don’t mean rejecting a given paper or objecting to a presentation. I am referring to categorically rejecting a whole knowledge practice, on account that it uses some method or epistemology or (fill in the blank) that one doesn’t like. This turning…
Interaction Culture 