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…
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,…
I realized tonight, on a walk with my spouse, that much of what I am doing this summer is documenting the epistemology of criticism. In other words, I am trying to render explicit the ways that critics come to know whatever it is that they come to know, and to compare that with how social…
The School of Visual Arts in New York is now offering an MFA in design criticism. Though the program is oriented primarily to traditional design areas–urban planning, product design, and fashion–I think what they are doing should also be something that people in HCI should care about. Pointing out the primary role of design in…
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 