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…
As readers of this blog are well aware, HCI is at an interesting cross-roads. The history of the discipline is fundamentally scientific, with primary inputs from psychology and computer science. The future of the discipline appears minimally to include cultural, with the rise of affective, entertainment, domestic, social, and other culturally dense forms of computing.…
This morning I finally got around to watching the much vaunted Second Skin trailer about MMORPGs. I feel that the framing of the whole thing is wrong. Though virtual worlds have objective dimensions (the code, the UI, the subscribers, the paratext–by which I mean forums, blogs, guild sites, etc.), “virtual world” is also an intellectual…
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…
Here are some juicy quotes by French New Wave filmmaker and critic Godard on the relationship between criticism and filmmaking. As a critic, I already thought of myself as a filmmaker. Today [1962, after he started directing films] I still consider myself a critic, and in a sense, I’m even more of one than before.…
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…
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…
[Update] I have converted this 7-part series to a convenient PDF. You can download it here. General Introduction In my previous post I concluded that those of us who have a foot in the two worlds of literary/art criticism and interaction design should promote interaction criticism. I often get asked–by students, by design professionals in…
Interaction Culture 