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…
I have noticed a dark pattern among papers that align themselves with critical or humanistic approaches to HCI. I myself have been guilty of contributing to that pattern (though I am trying to reform). But I still see it all the time as a peer reviewer and also as a Ph.D. supervisor. And since I spend so…
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…
Read more The Criterial Knowledge Argument for Research Through Design
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…
On Friday, April 5, 2013, I saw something I would never expect to see: the passing of a critic reported as front page news in the New York Times. The critic in question was, of course, Roger Ebert, the celebrity film critic who passed away presumably (the obituaries aren’t clear on this) due to complications…
Periodically I post something on my course blog, Interaction Culture Class, that might be of broader interest than just the class. In such situations, I repost them on my personal blog. This is one such example, and its original post can be found here. Every year that I teach this class, the first few weeks…
Read more A False Dichotomy: Critics and Aesthetic Judgments
UPDATE 30 September 2015: This blog post has been expanded and developed in Shaowen Bardzell and my book, Humanistic HCI (Morgan & Claypool, 2015), in “Chapter 4: Enacting the Struggle for Truth in Full View: Writing and Reviewing Humanistic HCI Research.” * * * * * * Here is my thesis, so if you skip the rest…
Download a printable version. Noël Carroll is a philosopher of aesthetics, known for his work on the philosophy of film and in particular, horror film. A former student of George Dickie, Carroll is intellectually connected to British aesthetics, a tradition that historically has been skeptical of the “grand theory” tradition in the humanities in which…
Interaction Culture 