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!
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…
Read more A Visual Representation of Dewey’s Notion of Experience
Last week at CHI’2012 I was invited to respond to Richard Shusterman’s talk on somaesthetics. Since then, a number of people have asked me for my slides, so I’ve uploaded them here. For what it’s worth, my slides are actually based on my commentary to Shusterman’s chapter on Somaesthetics in the Encyclopedia of HCI at…
Sorry I haven’t been as active on this blog of late; I’m going up for tenure soon, and blogging doesn’t seem to count for much. (Even though I have to wonder how blogs stack up to conference presentations in terms of scholarly impact.) Anyway, I recently composed a position paper that started as a rant…
Introduction Textual analysis is fundamental to many kinds of research, from psychology to literature, philosophy to information science. Not surprisingly, different strategies have emerged from within the various disciplines that do textual analysis, and naturally these strategies reflect the epistemologies of the disciplines from which they emerge. And as long as one stays insular to…
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…
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,…
Interaction Culture 