Sorry I haven’t been as active on this blog of late; I’m going up for tenure soon, and blogging doesn’t seem to count for much. (Even though I have to wonder how blogs stack up to conference presentations in terms of scholarly impact.) Anyway, I recently composed a position paper that started as a rant…
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.…
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…
I just received a CFP for a special issue on “enculturating HCI.” Now, “enculturating” is a rather strange word, which I will talk more about below, but for now let me at least say what it seems to mean in this CFP: “making HCI cultural.” Here is the intro: We are living in a globalized…
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…
A recent trip to California left me inside of airplanes long enough to watch Godard‘s 1960 film Breathless. This film was enormously influential for its in-your-face style, which flaunted the “rules” of editing and made Godard an overnight sensation. One often hears of film editing as an invisible art, that is, when done well, you…
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…
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…
Interaction Culture 