These Beauteous Forms: Liberty, Grief, and Memory
And I have felt A presence that disturbs me with the joy …
Critical Theory and Interaction Design (MIT Press) is Available!
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…
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Criticality Need Not Be Negative in HCI
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…
Why We Turn Away
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…
The “Knowledge as a By-Product of Artistic Practice is Still Not Research” Objection to My “Criterial Knowledge” Post
I spoke to some colleagues about my earlier post, The Criterial Knowledge Argument for Research Through Design, who are themselves experts in research through design [EDIT: the researchers in question are Jodi Forlizzi and John Zimmerman]. While these colleagues were generally sympathetic to the claim that art and design can contribute to knowledge in general and even…
The Criterial Knowledge Argument for Research Through Design
NOTE: This post was prompted by a lively discussion on the PhD Design distribution list. Special thanks to Mike Zender for prompting me to flesh this out.. One of the methodological strategies I have been using for the past year and a half for my study of research through design is to construct an inventory…
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Research Through Design: A Humanistic Conception
Note #1: This is adapted from a post I submitted to the PhDDesign distribution list’s thread on “Research through design.” Note #2: This is a preliminary attempt to formulate the perspective I am developing in my sabbatical monograph, Design As Inquiry. If you like what I’m doing, or if you think I’m nuts and want…
An Erotics of Research
This is going to be short, more like a provocation than a serious post. This quote really stirred me. What [philosopher Arthur Danto’s book] The Transfiguration [of the Commonplace] really attempts to do is to display a certain train of ideas, a certain set of discoveries and the questions opened up by them. It is…
A Visual Representation of Dewey’s Notion of Experience
Dewey’s notion of aesthetic experience is both reasonably easy to learn and use, and it has been very influential in user experience design practice and theory. Because I teach it at least once a year, and because I always seem to be drawing the same basic picture of it, I decided to make a more…
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The “Intentional Fallacy” and the “Affective Fallacy” of Interaction Design?
This post is a speculative exploration of an interesting position. I do not present it as my considered position; rather, I am just trying to think through some interesting thoughts. I encourage people to engage with me on this via comments. The gist of the issue has to do with what we take to be…
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Interaction Culture 