Produce a Critique, Or, What and How to Write Continued from Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3. I apologize that it has taken a week to resume writing in this series. Part of the problem was a very busy week, but another part of it was that I wasn’t quite as sure what I…
Building a Critical Interpretation This post continues a multi-part series on interaction criticism begun here. The series goal is to offer a useful introduction to criticism in the context of interaction design, targeted at interaction design professionals. In the previous part, I laid out some critical reading strategies, that is, techniques that critics use to…
Low-Level Interpretive Strategies, or, Things to Look For In Part 1 of this series, I covered three high-level critical strategies: thinking through associations, modeling the act of reading/interpretation, and identifying resonant passages/examples. Reading through them, I can imagine interaction design professionals thinking that all that sounds fine and well, but still not really knowing how…
Salon.com today has published a story on the recent book by Ronan McDonald, The Death of the Critic. I have not read the book, but I have some comments about the Salon.com story (or, more specifically, dialogue between its two main critics) and the topic in general. The primary thesis of the book seems to…
Here’s an experience for you: sit back, close your eyes (but not really because then you won’t be able to read the post. Unless you ask that person sitting next to you to read the rest aloud for you), think of Italy-the delectable food, the canals of Venice, the Alps. Now you’re stretching your arms…
Last week, I conducted some user studies to learn about music libraries. One of the participants commented on how cool mix tapes were yet how rarely he creates playlists in iTunes. I started to wonder about the differences between old and new music media formats. In particular, I was interested in the differences between mix…
Read more mix tapes vs. digital playlists (mediation, meaningful objects and sign values)
Jenny Brown sent around a link to this website. I believe it does a nice job illustrating many of the aesthetic concepts we struggled with yesterday (especially hypermediation!). http://fc01.deviantart.com/fs13/f/2007/077/2/e/Animator_vs__Animation_by_alanbecker.swf p.s. if it is illegal to post this link for some reason, I take full responsibility for it and ask you to forget that I mentioned…
In dialog surrounding the reviews of a recent paper a colleague and I submitted, one of the reviewers, resisting our call for a greater emphasis on criticism in interaction design on the grounds that psychology already does it, asked the following question: How can you prevent the “anything-goes-subjectivism” when the judgments are not objective? This…
So I was reading through my google reader feeds, and came across this gem over at Functioning Form. The post came out of the recent conference VizThink which has this example. I think that this example is very compelling as both represent some kind of fact, or statistic (reminds me of Mark Twain’s quote…
We all have a general conception about aesthetics and we discussed most of that in the class. Based on that I tried to have a discussion with my fellow photographer friends. In common terms, it is something that is appealing, an epitome of beauty, a piece of art, or more broadly something that gives us…
Interaction Culture 