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…
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 