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…
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…
Recently interaction-design.org sent me a preview of an upcoming encyclopedia chapter on aesthetic interaction, entitled “Visual Aesthetics in HCI and Interaction Design,” by Noam Tractinsky. I read through his piece and the existing commentaries that were online at the time. I couldn’t help but notice that Tractinsky himself and all of the commenters all represented…
This post is continued from two earlier parts: In Part 1 I offer a broad rationale for my position In Part 2 I offer specific recommendations for ACs and reviewers In this part, I offer my own recommendations for the research community moving forward. I stress from the outset that this is a position. I…
This post follows on from my previous post, in which I outline my position on peer reviewing and my reasoning for it. In this post, I offer four observations in the form of a guide to serving as a good Associate Chair (AC). [1] A CHI paper submission typically represents 12-24 months of a research…
HCI is continuing a trend towards using conferences, rather than journals or books, as the premier venue for published work. The speed of the submission-decision cycle often means that decisions are fast and binary: one shot and you’re in or you’re out. And in this process, a very small number of people hold a lot…
Salon has an article today about a controversy that happened recently at Print magazine, when it published a critique of Apple. The original critique is here (and has some very interesting analysis beyond its basic premise): http://printmag.com/Article/An-Anatomy-of-Uncriticism And the Salon article on the dust-up is here: http://www.salon.com/2012/01/12/design_critique_imprint/ One thing at stake in all this is…
As many of this blog’s readers know, my background is in the Humanities, which has been a good and bad thing for me as a researcher in the predominantly scientific discipline of HCI. For several years, one of my projects has been to clarify and distinguish from each other scientific and humanistic modes of knowledge…
Interaction Culture 