I’m going to share some discomfort with you. Reading a 1960s-era essay by African-American author James Baldwin, I found myself directly and uncomfortably addressed: White man, hear me! Uh-oh. He had just finished criticizing Whites for pretending not to see the racial history of the United States, so his direct address elevated my pulse. But…
Note: The opinions expressed here are my own individual opinions and do not represent those of anyone else, including the school or university where I work. This spring, I took a new position as Dean of the School of Information and Library Science at University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill. I started April 1, with all…
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!
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…
A post by Salon’s film critic Stephanie Zacharek today passes along the chief finding from a study by Martha M. Lauzen at San Diego State University, which finds that 70% of newspaper film critics are men. Zacharek redirects the focus from male-versus-female to the broader phenomenon that professional film critics appear to be a dying…
Examples and Explanations of Design Criticism Writing Last week I posted Part 4 in my series on Interaction Criticism. Since then, I have read many more examples of design criticism, and so I want to expand on what I wrote in Part 4 with a bonus post. First, I’d like to revise something I wrote…
Via Salon.com, I found a blurb about a viral video for the Obama campaign. I checked out the video, and I was quite impressed. The production qualities are high, which is what seemed to impress Salon. But that’s not what got me excited enough to blog about it; what impressed me was how authentically YouTube…
Interaction Culture 