Four Directions in Academic Design Criticism In Part 5 of this series (which more or less begins here), I sampled writings about designs from various design magazines to show examples of ways that people write about design. In it, I showed that people actually talk about design in some very diverse ways, and yet each…
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…
Produce a Critique, Or, What and How to Write Continued from Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3. I apologize that it has taken a week to resume writing in this series. Part of the problem was a very busy week, but another part of it was that I wasn’t quite as sure what I…
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 