• Edward Tufte, Visual Explanations
• David Weinberger, Everything Is Miscellaneous
• Michael Bierut, Seventy-nine Short Essays on Design
• Dan Roam, The Back of the Napkin
• Alain de Botton, The Architecture of Happiness
• Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein, Nudge
• Jeffrey Kluger, Simplexity

The last four books move beyond the areas of interaction & experience design and into the related realms of visual thinking, physical architecture, decision architecture, and what Kluger dubs "the art of making complex things simple."   William J. Mitchell's essays on the intersection of physical architecture and digital information networks (collected in such books as Me++, e-topia, City of Bits and Placing Words) are also worth exploring for anyone interested in understanding how the "endless flow of information" unleashed by the web and related technologies is challenging architects to find new ways to integrate the physical and virtual realms.

Of the books on and Malouf & Evans' list, Alan Cooper's About Face 3.0, Bill Buxton's Sketching User Experiences, and Lidwell/Holden/Butler's Universal Principles of Design have been regulars on my bedside reading table of late.  I highly recommend all three.

For those who think discussions of semantic value and meaning are pointless, with no relationship to technology adoption, you may want to skip this post. 

We first discussed visual tags in 2006. Many people today refer to them as 2d barcodes. However, a crucial difference exists between what things are like and what they in fact are. Calling visual tags (v-Tags) 2d barcodes is like calling YouTube a video database, Flickr a photo database, or Del.icio.us a favorites list.  Literally, the description is accurate. Functionally, it is meaningless.

Discussions about v-Tags invariably note that the technology is new and not well-known, except by a few early adopters. Using the term 2d barcode to describe the applications this technology affords is one sure way of stretching out the adoption curve rather than speeding it up. Consider the difference between suggesting "let's 2d barcode" a person, place, or thing versus suggesting "let's v-Tag" them or it. 

Our initial point in discussing this technology innovation was to take note that these v-Tags represent another web 2.0 application stemming from ubiquitous computing. The point was made in relation to Peter Morville's discussion of Findability and the notion, which since became a meme of its own, that entire cities are developing into user interfaces as John Thackara and Malcolm McCullough initially pointed out. Our basic point on visual tagging went as follows:

The metadata necessary for accessing relevant information is largely in the context, the embodied situation of the user.

From the first time I heard the word folksonomy, a key concept to web 2.0, I really liked the concept. The idea of people building metadata about persons, places, and things as they experience them by tagging those experiences in their own terms really seems cool, tight, or whatever terms goes with your demographic, if you appreciate the concept of sociality.

One of the reasons people continue referring to v-Tags as 2d barcodes relates to the fact that no standard exists governing their creation or readability by different scanning software run on various mobile phones. However, the lack of a standard for the hardware and software supporting a specific application of web 2.0 technology doesn't mean we can't be clear about what the application in fact does. Visual tagging is useful in creating social networks around products, augmenting people's experience with places, mobile learning, and transacting eCommerce at websites, among other potential uses.

So far, people creating v-Tags mostly design them to connect the person using a mobile device to a specific url destination for a specific purpose, i.e. transact business, advertise, tell a story, share an experience with a community. However, if we know anything about the way people use technology, one thing that people doing experience design know is that users find their own ways to apply technology, often outside the intentions of the designer. In fact, the interpretive flexibility of web 2.0 is one of its defining features and key to the importance of the folksonomy concept and tagging.

Currently, people create v-Tags with software on personal computers using Google Charts API or some other software, though that way of visually tagging a person, place, or thing isn't the only possible creation technique. Oliver Starr gets directly to the point in "The future of 2-d barcodes" regarding the future potential of v-Tags (which he refers to as 2D barcodes) over at Sprint's PhoneIQ site. Regarding the current restriction that v-Tags are created on computers, he notes:

But the problem is that, again, that’s not a spontaneous act to create your own barcode, and they have software that allows you to even put it on a T-shirt or make stickers or business cards and that’s very cool, but again it requires you to be at a PC, have access to a printer. It's not something where you could take, for example if you had photosensitive paint and your camera could actually take an image with a flash which then created in real time a 2D barcode on a surface because you were just reporting on something related to that area.

However, we don't need to think as far in the future as Starr to envision uses of v-Tags that go beyond a convenient, but controlled, navigation aid to additional information about a person, place, or thing. It is not far-fetched to envision uses of visual tagging that mimic urban graffiti, with people sticking their own v-Tags on objects to add social networking to the point of connection rather than its destination.

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In Australian universities there is a growing emphasis on student engagement.  Experiential Learning and active learning are central. While ‘experience design’ is claimed to be addressed by contemporary game designers; ‘learning design’ to be addressed by contemporary educational designers, and educators claim to assess the educational impacts on students of learning designs, there is a paucity of evaluations of ‘learning experience’ design. One of the challenges is how a 3D environment can be designed for its emotional contribution to students engagement and the learning experience. How can we measure motivation and other emotions evident in  simulations and games?

This is worth my simmering

Nike initiated a collaboration with Apple a couple of years ago to take advantage of ubiquitous computing as a Web 2.0 application, supporting a social networking initiative that offers a good example of how to engage customers. Nike allows customers to track their runs using an RFID sensor placed inside one shoe and, either a SportBand or an iPod + a Sport Kit that includes an RFID sensor and an iPod nano receiver.

As the Nike+ site indicates:

Nike+ is designed for athletes who like to run with music and who want to measure and monitor their progress toward their goals. To get instant workout feedback, you’ll need Nike+ ready shoes and either a Nike+ SportBand or an iPod® nano and Nike + iPod Sport Kit nano (which includes a sensor and iPod nano receiver). When placed under the sockliner of the left Nike+ ready shoe, the sensor measures your pace, distance, time elapsed and calories burned. This information is transmitted wirelessly to the receiver for real-time audio feedback while you listen to your favorite workout music. Learn more at Nikeplus.com.

Using a somewhat different set of Web 2.0 technologies, Adidas integrates social media with its products by taking advantage of visual tags, or 2d barcodes, to support a social networking site for Japanese enthusiasts wanting to celebrate  Adidas shoes. In this instance, the Adidas logo is transformed into a visual tag, or 2d barcode (in this instance using a QR Code).

The celebrate Adidas website takes a while to load and doesn't really provide much opportunity for the enthusiasts to connect. However, it does allow each person to upload an image of themselves and attach a nickname to it.

You can then search by nickname and embed an enthusiast into your blog, perhaps your own, though Wordpress doesn't allow javascript so I can't do it here. Apparently, Adidas also embeds a visual tag into its running shorts.

Thanks to Roger over at 2d code for pointing to the Adidas celebration.

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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, and I hope to revise it into a paper soon. In the meantime, I have gotten lots of requests for places to start reading, and so this final post in the series I offer some resources for you to explore.

There are two categories of works I will mention here. First, there are works in the field of HCI that take critical perspectives. Second, there are general and introductory works to critical theory and aesthetics.

Critical Approaches to HCI

I will mention a few works in HCI that take critical perspectives. But before I do, I want to take a position. All of the works in this area I am about to cite are inspirations and models to me. While I have various pecky critiques and peeves for each, I love them all and must acknowledge how enormously influential and inspirational they have been to me.

That said, I do not recommend that interaction designers, especially with scientific backgrounds, rely on them to understand how critical theory can interface with HCI in a way sufficient to support critical practice (they're fine, of course, if all one wants is to get a sense for what critical HCI looks like). None of them are introductory works on critical theory, because all of them are original applications of critical theory in the domain of HCI. They may offer some introductory remarks, but these are (appropriately) merely geared to ensure that readers understand the works in question--not to ensure that readers understand critical theory in any nuanced way. But critical theory is all about nuance; none offers an explicit methodology, as it relies instead on the creative intellectual capacity of the critic to make use of the theory to explicate and/or interpret a given phenomenon. Additionally, critical theory has its own history and relationships to the history of art and design, and it loses quite a bit when it is ripped out of that context.

The risk--and one I have seen actualized many times--is that people appropriate critical theories that they have read about in HCI literature in poor ways. They simply don't understand them, and it's obvious to anyone who has had exposure to the theory in question. I don't want to be an elitist at all--I really want our field to make full use of critical theory and (I really mean this) to innovate on it--but at the same time, there have to be some standards with regard to how these are appropriated. Yanking a critical concept willy nilly out of its context because of apparent similarities to the way one already understands something in interaction design is a poor use of critical theory. Critical theory does not exist to confirm what we think, offering a fancy vocabulary to justify us; it is supposed to transform how we think, offering an approach to helping us think the unthought, to have ideas we couldn't have without it.

So, without further ado, here are things I heartily recommend as ways of seeing how critical theory interfaces with HCI, and which I heartily do not recommend as introductions to critical theory. It is not comprehensive. Remember this is just a blog!

• Bardzell, J. & Bardzell, S. Interaction Criticism: A Proposal and Framework for a New Discipline of HCI. In In CHI’08 Extended Abstracts. ACM Press (2008), 2463-2472.
• Bertelsen, O. & Pold, S. Criticism as an Approach to Interface Aesthetics. Proc. of NordiCHI ’04, ACM Press (2004). 23-32.
• Blythe, M., Wright, J., McCarthy, J., and Bertelsen O. Theory and method for experience-centered design. Proc. of CHI 2006, ACM Press (2006), 1691-1694.
• Boehner, K., DePaula, R., Dourish, P. & Sengers, P. Affect: From information to interaction. In Bertelsen, O. et al. (eds). Critical Computing—Between sense and sensibility, ACM Press (2005), 59-68.
• Dourish, P. Where the Action Is: The Foundations of Embodied Interaction. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, USA, 2001.
• Löwgren, J., & Stolterman, S. Thoughtful Interaction Design. MIT Press, 2004.
• McCarthy, J. & Wright, P.  Technology as Experience. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA. (2004).
• Sengers, P. and Gaver, B. Staying open to interpretation: Engaging multiple meanings in design and evaluation. Proc. of DIS 2006, ACM Press (2006), 99-108.
• Sengers, P., McCarthy, J., & Dourish, P. Reflective HCI: Articulating an agenda for critical practice. In CHI’06 Extended Abstracts. ACM Press (2006), 1683-1686.
• Udsen, L., & Jørgensen, A. The Aesthetic Turn. Digital Creativity, 16 (4), 205-216.

So I hope that's helpful.

Introductions to Critical and Cultural Theory and Aesthetics

If you want to practice, as opposed to read up on, critical approaches to HCI, then in my opinion, you minimally need to read about critical theory in its original context, which is literary, art, design, and cultural criticism. As noted earlier, I believe this because critical theory is not merely difficult (like all theory) but also because (also like all theory) it emerged in historical contexts, where one theorist was responding to the works of an earlier theorist, or a theorist was elaborating new theory at a time of major political or aesthetic change (e.g., the rise of modernism and the totalitarian state). These contexts matter!

I also recommend that people start with introductory readings. That may sound condescending. You might think, why don't I just go out and read Heidegger or Barthes myself and form my own opinions? You can, but I don't think it's the most efficient way to get a practical, working knowledge of how to use the theory. This is so for many reasons. The main one is that Foucault or Derrida or Bakhtin or whoever wasn't writing in Silicon Valley in 2008 about interaction design, but rather was writing in a different country, in a different historical era, about different stuff. And, by implication, for an audience other than us! That audience is assumed to know all sorts of things that, if you are still reading this post, you probably don't already know. Derrida, for example, wrote assuming that the reader had already mastered (i.e., studied extensively, know the secondary literature on, and have mature, philosophical opinions of one's own on), for example, Heidegger. Of course, to understand Heidegger, you need to have a similar mastery of Husserl, Kant, and Aristotle. And so on. Most of us aren't in that audience, and that means we'll miss a lot of nuance and significance of what we read.

Introductory books explain the key ideas to serious, intelligent people who don't yet have that mastery. There is no shame in that, and I cite them all the time. My student's edition of what could have been titled "What Foucault Said" has been more influential on me than anything Foucault wrote, and I actually have read the majority of Foucault's writings available in English, right down to interviews and minor essays. Still, that intro book lays out the big picture and offers the framework in which I organize all those writings.

So there are five introductions to literary and critical theory that I am happy to recommend. I even append a brief comment about each, to help you in your selections. Again, this is not a comprehensive or carefully crafted list.

• Peter Barry. Beginning Theory: An Introduction to Literary and Cultural Theory. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1995 (second ed. 2002). I just discovered this one, and I really like it. It does a good job of balancing theoretical concepts with a focus on method, that is, how such and such a concept might affect the way you read. I really wish I had had it as an undergrad.
• Terry Eagleton. Literary Theory: An Introduction. Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1983. This is the classic work that everyone has read, but I actually am not crazy about it as an introduction. (I like it as an original work of theory, though.) My concern is that Eagleton does not really try to fairly represent the core ideas of each theory on their own terms, but rather interprets them on his own terms as he presents. Thus, there is a lot of critique in this book, which itself is great, but it interferes with its introductory capacity, IMHO.
• Raman Selden (Ed.). The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism: Volume VIII: From Formalism to Poststructuralism. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1995 (2005). I love this volume, but it may be a little too oriented toward practitioners of literary studies. If you want to take your skills to the next level with key 20th century literary theory, particularly those influenced by linguistics, then this is a good next step. But if you're just starting, I probably wouldn't recommend this one.
• Lois Tyson. Critical Theory Today: A User-Friendly Guide. New York: Routledge, 2005. This book delivers on the promise of its title. It introduces all the major schools in very acccessible chapters. My favorite feature: every chapter contains a section called "Some Questions ____ Critics Ask About Literary Texts," (the blank is filled with the chapter topic: psychoanalytic, deconstructionist, feminist, etc.). These questions are a fantastic launching point for people first acquainting themselves with these theories who also want to practice using the theories. Love. It.
• Patricia Waugh (Ed.). Literary Theory and Criticism: An Oxford Guide. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. This phone book of an anthology covers quite a bit of ground. The chapters I have read have been readable and accessible introductions to the relevant theory--quite impressively so. The only downside is that some of the chapters introduce, develop, and justify the theoretical concepts without really saying anything about how to apply them. You are supposed to figure that out for yourself (and that's exactly what is expected of trained critics, but those of us outside literary studies might prefer at least a little direction).

So much for the big introductions. I also want to mention aesthetics in this post. One might think that literary/cultural studies and aesthetics would more or less be synonymous. In a sense, they are. But there's also a very significant distinction that's worth mentioning. And I'm going to oversimplify it, but that's too bad. This is a blog.

In the 20th century, there was a split in philosophy, whereby the field broke into two large camps. One was called Analytic, and it emphasized logic and cognition and tended to be practiced in the UK, USA, and Scandinavia. It gave us thinkers such as Carnap, Russell, and Quine. The other group was Continental, and it was primarily French and German, and focused on language, reader reception, and ideology; it gave us thinkers such as Heidegger, Habermas, Foucault, Derrida, and concepts such as postmodernism. These two groups had unpleasant things to say about each other.

The significance for our purposes is that, from what I can tell, people who use terms like literary theory, cultural theory, critical theory, and so on, are generally influenced by Continental philosophy. (Full disclosure: this was my training, and my strength, but I'm no longer a partisan for it--or against it.) In my readings, people who use the term "aesthetics" are more likely to have an Analytic background. And I love their work, even though they say bad things about my French intellectual heroes. There are many introductions to aesthetics as well, but there are two I have read cover-to-cover and wholeheartedly recommend:

• George Dickie. Introduction to Aesthetics: An Analytic Approach. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997. Dickie is deservedly famous for his institutional theory of art, a brilliantly clear thinker, and a surprisingly concise, accessible writer. How can I possibly improve on that as a recommendation? This book is under 200 pages!
• Gordon Graham. Philosophy of the Arts: An Introduction to Aesthetics. New York: Routledge, 1997 (3rd edition 2005). I need to teach more classes so I can make more students read this book! After offering a general theory of art, Graham examines each of the arts (visual arts, literary arts, music, performing arts, architecture, etc.) focusing on two seemingly simple questions: "What is the distinctive value of ____" (where the blank is filled with a given type of art) and "How does ____ direct the mind?" This second question, which at first struck me as a little idiosyncratic, is, in Graham's hands, quite fecund. (It is also bracingly cognitive, but I'll resist further criticism for now.)

Finally, and I really, really need to stop, unless someone is going to give me tenure based on a series of blog posts, I want to direct your attention to a few series that overall I really like, even if individual items in them can be uneven. Basically, and this is true of all four of the series, each volume takes on a single topic, is slender (usually between 100-200 pages), and written for a serious, but introductory audience. Rather than offering brilliant critique and original thinking, each instead offers a meat-and-potatoes introduction to its topic, based on the present consensus view of that topic. All are well referenced and, from what I have seen, actually written by legitimate experts in the field. So, if after reading some theory you decide you want to get a better handle on Lyotard's critique of twentieth-century scientific thinking, you've got a great next step. Combined, these four series have over 100 volumes. They're totally overpriced, so if someone from Routledge is reading this, now is the time for you to blush. Still, you'll get a lot out of them, so bite the bullet.

• Key Sociologists (series editor Peter Hamilton), published by Routledge. Sample authors: Simmel, Foucault, Weber, Bourdieu.
• Routledge Critical Thinkers: Essential Guides for Literary Studies (series editor Robert Eaglestone), published by Routledge. Sample authors: Barthes, Lyotard, Kristeva, Zizek.
• A Guide for the Perplexed (no specified series editor), published by Continuum. Sample authors: Deleuze, Derrida, Adorno, Levinas.
• A Very Short Introduction (no specified series editor), published by Oxford University Press. Sample topics: Poststructuralism, Barthes, Literary Theory, Kant, Wittgenstein, Russell.

Of course, none of the books in the second half of this post are meant to replace reading the real thing. I certainly would not discourage someone from reading Foucault. But I would strongly discourage interaction designers who do not have a background in the humanities from reading Foucault or Barthes or Bakhtin without also reading some of the introductory literature about Foucault or Barthes or Bakhtin. This will hopefully help prevent the problem of people citing critics where their understanding is actually (and all too obviously) derived from reading about them in HCI literature.

"Interaction Criticism: How to Do It" Series Conclusion

I hope this collection of posts is helpful in arousing interest and giving leads to people with new interest in critical approaches to HCI. I also welcome constructive criticism, via email, as comments right here on the blog, or in your own blogs.

Thanks to all of you for the encouragement to see this series through, especially Shaowen Bardzell, Erik Stolterman, Mark Blythe, Gilbert Cockton, Alan Blackwell, Mattias Arvola, Tyler Pace, Will Odom, Hyewon Gim, James Pierce, Jordan Fugate, Heather Wiltse, and the PhD Design distribution list.

There are several reasons why this activity is important. First, the two epistemological positions are sufficiently incompatible that both sides don't "get" each other. To critics, social scientists can come off looking intellectually lazy, provincial, and mechanistic. To social scientists, critics can come off looking arrogant, totally subjective, and fluffy (not in the good way, like stuffed animals, but in the bad way, that is, lacking rigor). Second, my field (HCI), a traditionally social science-dominated field with an increasing interest in cultural categories, such as "experience" and "aesthetics," is the site of a collision between these two epistemologies, and believe me, it's not going well so far. And third, I'm trying to be one of the voices of translation, if not conciliation. That is, it may be too much to ask a social scientist to think and act like a critic and vice-versa, but it seems to me quite reasonable to ask a social scientist or critic considering contemporary, culturally embedded interaction design to have a basic comprehension (and with it respect) of the opposing epistemological position. We need to get away from the name-calling.

To articulate the epistemology of criticism, I have--as recent and future posts on this blog illustrate--read a lot of criticism and reflected on how it differs from what I suppose a social science approach to the same phenomenon might look like (part of the problem is that they don't often consider "the same phenomenon," so much of my enterprise is speculative). The immediate goal of this is to develop a theory of "interaction criticism" that will, not to put too fine a point on it, get me tenure. Now, one of the problems (and thanks again to Shaowen for asking the question that led me to this thought) is that on the one hand, I want to respect critical approaches. I want to practice criticism with the same care, rigor, and sensibility as a "proper" critic. (As opposed to the way many in HCI today seem to grab onto a random concept from critical theory and drop it ungracefully into HCI-as-usual.) At the same time, I want to update criticism for the context of interaction design. An interaction design is not a novel, and I must be mindful not to treat it like one.

So I know, obviously, that literary and cultural theory cannot simply be ported from Jane Austen to Steve Jobs. But it is a much harder question to know, in everyday practice, when a deviation from "true" literary/cultural criticism in order to accommodate the special characteristics of interactive digital media, is in fact a compromise, and how much of one, and whether anything can be done to make up for it. To answer that question, it seems to me, one needs something of a philosophical awareness of one's use of critical theory.

There is a similar question to be answered as well, besides how does criticism differ from social science approaches, and that is, how does criticism in the arts (literature, painting, film) differ from criticism in design (architecture, interior design, industrial design, and fashion). I have some thoughts, but they need refinement. Probably that will happen in this space in the future as well.

In order to cultivate that philosophical awareness, I am attempting to articulate the epistemological underpinnings of these two different strategies for studying human-computer interaction.

come dice Frank “iconografia hells angels“ per Mike Giant

Although the video makes its points through a degree of exaggeration, the history of the stop sign in the United States does reflect some of the uncertainties depicted.

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As Adam observes, ethnography was one of the first new methods incorporated by design research to meet these challenges in the market. However, he thinks ethnography is, on its own, unable to provide the kind of information needed to validate product and service ideas across wide audiences. He notes: 

Ethnography breaks down at the moment we ask not just for depth of knowledge, but breadth. Anyone who’s struggled to conduct a massive ethnographic study across multiple time zones can tell you this firsthand. While ethnography facilitates the generation of ideas in relation to specific users and use scenarios, it leaves us clueless as to which among these will satisfy a wider audience. Ultimately, we need complementary methods that scale more effectively and validate our work in a way clients can understand. What we need is quantitative research...

But how? Just as ethnography borrowed heavily from academia while applying a looser, more liberal lens, quantitative research can be similarly engaged. When individual observations can be contextualized within a data-driven knowledge of the market at hand, designers can have the best of both worlds. And there are many analytical tools that work well in this context. Segmentation analysis can be used to challenge thinking around current and prospective users, sorting consumers into salient, sometimes unexpected groups that hold together based on survey data – groups that defy traditional demographic segments can be linked by more relevant factors, such as behavioral patterns or attitudes towards technology.

Adam makes several very good points in his analysis of what quantitative methods can bring to design research. Though he recognizes the importance of sustaining a focus on users, I suggest that Adam's discussion does not give enough explicit recognition to the role of empathy in maintaining a productive relationship between qualitative and quantitative methods in research for experience design. Making methods serve empathic purpose in the design of products and services is a key underlying principle, regardless of the quantitative or qualitative nature of the techniques.

Consider the project example Adam offers involving a redesign of a corporate Intranet for a Fortune 500 company. 

Without the ability to individually question the organization’s hundreds of thousands of employees, spread across some thirty countries, we did the next best thing: we interviewed 10,000 of them online. We asked them what was wrong with their current Intranet experience. What did they love? What did they hate? How could things be better? We did an online “card sort” in which we asked users to prioritize the content that mattered to them, then posed a series of free-response questions, in which they could say whatever they wanted.

Without knowing the strategic purpose behind the project it is difficult to gauge whether a traditional ethnographic approach might have worked as well as the methods chosen. Adam's point seems to assume a need to interview all employees for ethnography to work well. I don't think most ethnographers would agree that the expectation is either realistic or necessary for the participant observer method to provide effective results. Adam's critique also seems misplaced unless the 10,000 online interviews resulted from random sampling, which he does not say. Regardless of the answer, I suggest that either approach can incorporate principled empathic consideration for the meaningful experiences of the users of the Intranet.

Adam obviously recognizes the point made in the last paragraph since the techniques taken at the front of the project, before applying quantitative analysis to the data, were informed by an empathic concern for those using the Intranet, though Adam doesn't explicitly take note of it. The questions the team asked tapped into the meaningful experience of those users, and the online "card sort" provided additional qualitative information. Whether participant observation with carefully chosen ethnographic subjects might produce the same insights is a fair question. After all, Adam urges design researchers not to get hung up on the academic roots and concerns of quantitative methods, such as sampling, reliability, validity, etc. And I really do agree with his point on that issue.

Once the Intranet project collected all the responses to its open-ended questions from the online survey, Adam notes that:

We then tapped a vendor to break this sentence-level data into quantitative codes, creating a massive tally for common response themes like “It’s slow” or “I can’t find what I’m looking for.” Once we were able to look at this feedback quantitatively, common themes emerged...Some insights were limited to specific regions or business units, while others resonated with nearly all respondents, revealing the unique considerations of various user groups within the organization. Together, we synthesized 4,000 pages of tabs into fifteen slides, weaving in insights from secondary research, stakeholder interviews, industry best practices, and our own perspective to make a strategic recommendation to the client. When possible, we showed quantitative responses side-by-side with quotes from respondents to illustrate nuance and context while summarizing key themes.

It seems to me that the importance of the approach Adam advocates for using quantitative data in design research does not come down to traditional academic concerns about whether the results' reliability predict this or that outcome from proposed design changes. Gerald Zaltman made a similar point in How Customers Think, noting that, "the various pieces of information that we gather through statistics, personal observations, and other data sources...are all stimuli that influence our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. By viewing data in this way, most managers suddenly see the value of collecting multiple kinds of data" (p. 275).

Data don't speak for themselves, as much as stimulate meaningful conversations between design research, users/customers, and client management. Those conversations can result in interpretations that make a difference for the design of products and services offered by the business. In my reading, this is the main point offered in Adam's article. And it is a key point to make. I suggest that design practice works best when the research team doesn't choose between artistic and scientific techniques, whether qualitative or quantitative. The most effective design practice crafts a meaningful experience for users/customers from the tension between the two (art/science), and offers insights managers can relate to regarding the likely benefits for the business, e.g. ROI, time to market, product differentiation, cost containment, market share, etc.

Thanks to Mark at Putting People First for the pointer to Adam's article.

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http://www.benarent.co.uk/process.php

The essence of rich internet applications

An experience planner's blog

The doors were closed as we built the feature set to a sensible point, but now they're open!

Got to getcloser.com and start to play. If you just want to see what it's about you can visit the tour here without having to register.

The site is aimed music and film fans who like collecting, who want to broaden their knowledge and deepen their relationship with the things they love. It's also aimed at aficionados, those that are domain experts, music and film creators and people who just want to be in the know.

For the past year LBi have been working with HMV to conceive, build, seed and launch their new social property getcloser.com. It's a beta, so there is still lots to do, the data and product catalogue that sits behind it needs a little work, but it's now ready to unleash on the world so that the community can start driving the development, helping add content, improving the tags, data, descriptions etc..

I won't go into the details as to what the site does etc, the tour can do that, but what I will say is this; it's been one of the most enjoyable projects I've ever worked on. Building a community of this type has it's usual design challenges, not least that you need to build a community and to do that you need content, but you need content from the community!

HMV have been a fantastic client and the LBi team have been awesome. We used an agile development methodology that saw us release features every 2-4 weeks, slowly build a community, user test, evolve, sharpen.

As I say, there is lots to do though not just with the website as the idea behind getcloser translates to many channels; in store, on mobile and others. It will plug into existing social properties, blog tools and the desktop.

The relationship with HMV has been brilliant, long may it continue,

I very much look forward to taking Getcloser forward, but now it's live it's 'hand's off the steering wheel' as my colleague Stephen Barber would say, to see how people respond to it. We'll be making hot fixes and planning a new set of features that aid the tools there already, as well as developing new ones.

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 of these ways was accepted and even used in more or less similar ways. For example, some people talk about the internal language of a design, while others talk about the design as an instance of a movement (e.g., modernism), while others describe the design's effect on the user-viewer-reader. In saying this, I am repeating an idea developed in a paper presented this year at alt.chi that I wrote with Shaowen Bardzell, "Interaction Criticism: A Proposal and Framework for a New Discipline of HCI." In it, we argued that criticism typically derives from one or more of the following core directions:

• Designer-Centered Criticism: Explaining a design as a product of its creator.
• Artifact-Centered Criticism: Explaining a design as possessing its own "internal language" or aesthetic/functional value, and explicating what that artifact means (in itself)
• User-Centered Criticism: Explaining a design as a prompt that causes certain effects in the mind or experience of the user
• Sociocultural-Centered Criticism: Explaining a design as a part of a broader sociocultural movement, such as "bauhaus" or "Soviet" design

What I'd like to do in this post is show some examples of this kind of criticism in "serious" design discourse, by which I mean academic essays (as opposed to the magazine reviews in Part 5). As always, a goal of this entire series of posts is to demonstrate that interaction criticism offers a point of view, a type of insight, a series of methods, and (more fundamentally) an epistemological stance that differs from a scientific one. I do not here need to privilege a scientific versus critical or "designerly" stance over the other. It is sufficient to show that they have different methods, ends, and standards of rigor. The historically scientific HCI community is now openly seeking more designerly ways of knowing, and I am simply responding to that request.

The Designer-Centric Approach

I have approached this topic in the past by looking at theories about professionals/designers, especially the work of Donald Shön and those who have developed his line of thinking in design, such as (full disclosure: my program director) Erik Stolterman. But I want to get away from theory and show some examples. So here I will talk about an essay by Michael Bierut on one of his mentors and former employers, Massimo Vignelli, entitled, "Massimo Vignelli's Pencil." As before, I will string some quotes together for you and then talk a little about them afterward:

Unlike many designers, he didn't mind being imitated. On the contrary, he prided himself on creating solutions that could be replicated, systems that were so foolproof anyone could do them.... [He seemed to want to] enlist an army of disciples to design the world in his image....

[He was] [a]lways optimistic, never cynical.... Even creating something as simple as a business card ... would require sketch after sketch as Massimo tried to coax a few trusted elements and a famously limited palette of typefaces into some surprising new form....

[His singular] passion is what many of Vignelli's critics miss when they group him with a generation of designers dedicated to a sterile brand of modernism. To be sure, he always argued for functionalism and clarity. But the rationalism of modernism requires absolute self-control.... Instead, Massimo's signature gestures--the expressionistic black stripes in the print work, the surreal contrasts of scale in the architecture, the inevitable intrusion of sensuality in the product design--were utterly intuitive, almost indulgent, and clearly as impossible for him to resist as breathing.

[Years later, the author revisits Vignelli's studio, after Vignelli has left it, and decided to leave a note for him, on Vignelli's desk, and using the master's signature pencil.] I picked up the pencil to leave a note and the familiarity of the sensation shocked me: I had switched to easier to find (and easier to lose) cheap black pens a long time ago. And when I looked at what I had written, I noticed something funny about the handwriting. It looked just like Massimo's.

This is a beautiful essay and I get goosebumps just retyping its closing words! What a lovely tribute! But that's not my purpose here.

I'd like to say a few things about the rhetoric of this piece. It talks about Vignelli as a designer, saying a few things about his philosophy and personal style. It continues to talk about how he fit into the dominant design stylistic movements of his age (the business about modernism), the particular characteristics of his work (his expressive indulgence), and how he has affected the author as someone familiar with his work. In short, this essay hits on all four points of design.

I call this designer-centered criticism, though, because the designer trascends the other three categories. Yes, you can call him a modernist, the author writes, but he's bigger than modernism; indeed, Vignelli transcends modernism exactly where modernism is itself weak. The designer stands as a critique to all of modernism. You can also talk about the particular features of his design--the expressive lines, the sensuality of its scale--but these are just signifiers of the designer behind them. He is not defined by these features; he, in his personality, biography, and beliefs, causes and defines them. Finally, the author goes so far as to suggest that he, and by implication his design work, is derivative of his former master. In other words, Vignelli didn't merely influence the author; the designer gave the author his very voice, and the authors works are in some important sense also Vignelli's.

Artifact-Centered Criticism

Here, I want to talk about a pretty well known essay in design circles: Richard Buchanon's "Declaration by Design: Rhetoric, Argument, and Demonstration in Design Practice," originally written in 1985, and (sadly) only now having a chance to get its message into HCI. I cannot do this article justice here, because it features a multilayered argument about technology and design that is rich beyond what I can do in few paragraphs. So I will stick to its core argument: design is a form of rhetoric.

[R]hetoric is an art of shaping society, changing the course of individuals and communities, and setting patterns for new action.... The primary obstacle to [understanding the design of technology as rhetoric] is the belief that technology is essentially part of science, following all of the same necessities as nature and scientific reasoning. If this is true, technology cannot be part of design rhetoric, except as a preformed message to be decorated and passively transmitted.... However, if technology is in some fundamental sense concerned with the probably rather than the necessary--with the contingencies of practical use and action, rather than the certainties of scientific principle--then it becomes rhetorical in a startling fashion. It becomes an art of deliberation about the issues of practical action.

[Buchanan moves onto the nature of the design argument:] the designer [is] a speaker who fashions a world, however small or large, and invites others to share in it.... This article suggests that the designer, instead of simply making an object or a thing, is actually creating a persuasive argument that comes to life whenever a user considers or uses a product as a means to some end.

In a lengthy and well illustrated and exemplified argument that follows, Buchanan says that a design argument involves "the interrelated qualities of technological reasoning, character, and emotion, all of which provide the substance and form of design communication." I paraphrase what he means by each of these below. (Incidentally, Buchanan's division here is adopted fairly literally from Aristotle's Rhetoric, which comforts me in its familiarity and authority, and concerns me in its, um, not-exactly-up-to-dateness.)

Technological reasoning is both the "how it actually works" of a design (from a spoon to a coffee grinder) to how the design communicates how it works (reveals, obfuscates, simplifies, metaphorically suggests, pseudo-reveals, etc.). A steering wheel gives me a sense of how a car turns, while the meaning of the "Publish" button on this blog software has a more distant relation to what happens behind the scenes when I click it.

Character reflects the designer, or more precisely, how the designer wants to appear in the design. Whether a design is playful, modest, utilitarian, ostentatious, user-friendly, avant-garde, etc., all get at its character. The difference between, say, a BMW and a Volkswagon is not merely a matter of engineering (the technological reasoning), but also the character the cars project on us.

Emotion (or pathos) refers to the way that a design connects to its user. Buchanan here emphasizes movement and lines and the way they beckon a user to touch, interact with, and relate to designs. He explicitly rejects exploitative or "coercive" emotion--such as (these are my examples) pictures of grotesque human corpses as a technique for engaging in the abortion or Iraq war debates. Instead, good designs serve practical human life in emotionally engaging and desirable ways.

Stepping back and looking at Buchanan's argument, he is focusing entirely on design artifacts, claiming that embedded in these artifacts is an internal language that makes an argument to users to partake in its vision of practical life. Certainly, this reflects the intentions of the designer; the sociocultural contexts of design, distribution, and use; and the interpretation and appropriation of the design by its user. But all of these are secondary, in some important sense embedded in and a consequence of the design argument presented by the artifact itself.

User-Centric Approaches

I wrote quite a bit about this in Part 5 of this series. Indeed, I had something of a personal breakthrough, in distinguishing between empirical, historical, actual, flesh-and-blood people as "users," and what I think I'll call the "hermeneutic user," that is, the "user" as a discursive construct created by the critic as a way to explore ways that humans deeply and subjectively respond to the experience of interacting with a design. This hermeneutic user is tied to notions of the "reader" from semiotics, which argues in some sense that a text not only contains "codes" that provide access to its content, but also "codes" that tell one how to be that text's ideal reader.

This is akin to the approach taken by Ann C. Tyler in "Shaping Belief: The Role of Audience in Visual Communication." She begins the piece by saying that she is continuing the rhetoric approach of Buchanan (described just above), but to me, she actually takes it in a different direction. Her essay emphasizes the interpretive process of the viewer of several posters. For example, she describes two 1972 airline travel posters, promoting travel to Asia.

The PanAm images are architectural in nature: the terraced land [of gardens in Bali] forms a contrasting figure/ground pattern; the two people standing with their backs to the audience become shapes against the sky. People and land become objects of beauty. Distanced from the scene through perspective and the lack of any reference back to the viewer, the audience thus remains "outside" a beautiful, tranquil scene. Landscape and people are frozen in time for the audience to view as they choose--as in a museum of artifacts. Both posters promise the audience an esthetic, non-participatory experience if they travel to these distant lands.

The rhythm of Tyler's rhetoric is like that of a tide coming in. Back-and-forth it goes between talking about objective features of the artifact and the response in the viewer. But with each back and forth, it inches ever toward the meaning in the interpretation of the viewer. As I asked in the previous post, just who is this viewer? It is the hermeneutic viewer; she is not talking about a survey of actual viewers but is rather using a hypothetical viewer as a strategy to explicate what the artifacts mean in the phenomenal world of humans that see these posters (as opposed to the posters in-themselves).

Sociocultural-Centered Criticism

This last category is perhaps the broadest. Whereas designer-centered criticism is often biographic, and artifact- and user-centered criticism are often rhetorical or semiotic, sociocultural-centered criticism borrows much from cultural studies, including art criticism, literary criticism, Marxism, feminism, new historicism, and a host of others.

For this section, I'll talk about an essay written by Tony Fry, "A Geography of Power: Design History and Marginality." He begins the essay with a fairly theory-heavy frame:

Design history is understood here as various and competing explanatory models of design. As with other emergent and established forms of institutionalized knowledge and practice, it exists in and produces conditions of marginality. The aim of this paper is to explore such conditions in the context of the rise of design in Australia.

It is not particularly uncommon for sociocultural-centered design criticism to be theory-heavy, given the vastness and sheer complexity of its subject. Obviously, the scope of the semantics of a juicer arm and the that of the entire history and institutionalization of design in Australia are on a different scale. And, to be fair, this article of all of the ones I include in this post is the most theoretical. But it does contain sections of criticism. Here is one of them:

Design, even prior to the management of a design profession, intervened to undercut the formation of a modern Australia as a discordant bricolage. Appropriation [of imported design materials and processes from the United States and Europe] was organized but not within a systemic plan. There was neither total chaos nor directed order but a pragmatic falling together of fragments. The disparate arrival of Ford [Motor Company] and Fordism [the industrial assembly line] is one contained example of this history.

The first Ford car was brought to Australia in 1904. Commercial importing began in 1909 with the Model T. As sales increased, an ad hoc system of distribution became locally established. Because of corrupt and profiteering practices that grew up around this network, the Ford company refused to trade with it and set up its own local administrative and distribution system instead. Ford Australia was formed in 1925. Fordism, however, was an industrial system of mass production based on the in-line assembly of interchangeable parts, arrived in Australia a year earlier. A Sydney-based manufacturer of compressers introduced such a method to its factory in 1924.... Product design and advertised image (the symbolic forms) were drawn from the USA. Here, then, was a mixture of appropriation and imposition, order, disunity, and disorder, and the object (the car, its system of production and distribution, and its symbolic form) as a sign of modernity. All of this adds up to one example of a local sign of a particular conjuncture and paradigm of modernity--"Americanism and Fordism" in Australia.

In this passage, we are understanding design from the twin lenses of theory and history, focusing on the twenty year period in which Ford and Fordism--which had emerged practically simultaneously in the United States--spills into Australia in non-systematic, non-random ways. The historical circumstances, in this passage, appear to overwhelm the design. In other words, the intentions of any individual designers are so tiny that they don't even register here. The product semantics of the cars and their reception by Australians are also dwarfed by the sheer cultural force of the assembly line and the Model T Ford.

Conclusion

I hope through these examples my readers, in particular those with scientific backgrounds who are hoping to appropriate more "designerly ways of knowing" (a phrase I keep using that also is the title of a wonderful book), are able to see how criticism both differs from science and yet has its own rigor. Obviously, Tony Fry had to master his history before he could develop his theory and criticism of Australian design history. Buchanan knew his Aristotle and yet had the intellectual creativity to appropriate it for design and make it mean something (not only is his essay great for anyone interested in design, but he also leverages it to offer a compelling argument for designerly approaches to technology). Tyler's comfortable mastery of rhetoric and semiotics, though not explicitly shoved down the reader's throat, is evident in her incisive ability to apply it so fruitfully in her interpretations of graphic designs. And Bierut's reflective and articulate ability to tease out what made both his master's and his own creative sensibilities tick is a model for anyone who wants to understand how designers analyze creativity, a rich mix of personal psychology, philosophy, anecdote, taste, and embodied gesture.

What started as a blog post is turning into a paper. I need to wind this down. I will post some readings here just to conclude it, but it may be a week to ten days before that happens. But the main argument, and my core purpose for beginning this, is, for better or worse, finished here. Thanks for bearing with its length and please share critical comments, because its next iteration will be peer reviewed! (One must make a case for tenure, after all!)

Some people can't get enough! Part 7 is here. It contains an annotated and heavily commented bibliography.

The more I immerse myself in readings that explicitly call themselves "design" (e.g., architecture, visual/graphic design, fashion, product design, interior design), the more obvious to me that certain forms of interaction "design" don't resemble design at all. I have considered writing a post (or maybe even a paper) explaining why "game design" is not "design" at all, by showing its intellectual roots, methodologies, and above all slightly depressing history of copycatting (99% of games) and deifying those very few that have had original ideas ("ZOMG Will Wright is a genius"). (I respect Will Wright, but romanticizing him as some Achilles of intellection is a cop-out.) Game "design" needs to move beyond the idolatry of the auteur, and at least one way to do so is to connect itself more rigorously to the field of design than it currently does. </rant>

I'll settle for a more modest focus today. This morning, I read a paper by Roger Scruton, noted British philosopher of aesthetics. Now, I'm normally not a big fan of his; he's hostile to the continental philosophy that has shaped my ways of thinking. But he's no slouch, and in the article I read, "Judging Architecture," he was grappling with an idea that I care very much about: demonstrating that aesthetic judgments are not anything-goes subjectivism, but are in fact grounded in rationality. After reading so many scientific papers (which are structured as a straightforward narrative of a study design, its results, and a deliberately narrow interpretation of the data), it was refreshing to read a truly philosophical argument concerning reasoning about judging architecture.

In the essay, Scruton carefully distinguishes among a number of key concepts: chief among them are taste, judgment, experience, preference, and rational thought. I didn't necessarily agree with his treatment of them all, but I sincerely appreciated the fact that he treated each of them with intellectual rigor.

After I read, I had a brief conversation with Erik Stolterman, and we discussed the absence of most of these terms in the field of interaction "design." Interaction design, as a field, has developed only the concepts of reason and (recently) experience from that list. The rest of the terms--taste, preference, and judgment--don't come up seriously in HCI literature. When I bring them up in papers, I inevitably get some smack-down from a reviewer that these ideas are "just subjective."

Scruton opens his essay attacking this position (that taste is all subjective and isn't worth arguing about) as indefensible. In his introduction, he writes,

Our [aesthetic] preference means something more to us than mere pleasure or satisfaction. It is the outcome of thought and education; it is expressive of moral, religious, and political feelings, of an entire Weltanschuuang, with which our identity is mingled.

Taste here is both based in human rationality (i.e., it is not irrational) and in education (i.e., it is intersubjective, not individual). So if taste is rational (not completely arbitrary) and shared by groups of users, it is something that interaction designers ought to care very much about. Other designers obviously do. Yet reviewing the previous paragraph of key words, the only one that traditional HCI cares about is "satisfaction"--one of the two terms Scruton rejects with a contemptuous "merely." The rest of the categories, which arguably are the most important in our lives, don't yet register: socio-cultural morality, an intersubjective world-view, and our identity itself.

There are objective and empirical aspects of a domain that obviously have huge importance for interaction designers, and social science research methods can be extremely effective at getting at them. But there are other aspects of a domain that require interpretation: identity, beauty, taste, morality, judgment among them. Why not turn to disciplines, especially sister design disciplines, that have developed rigorous approaches to dealing with them?

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 in the last edition:

magazine critiques are not academic and they are generally very positive (even gushing–I think one of their cultural functions is an intellectualized form of marketing and promotion, but I’m going to leave that alone for now).

It remains true that most of what I am writing about comes from magazines, and not peer reviewed journals, so I don't want to lose sight of that context. That said, the "gushing" I referred to was not quite right. After flipping through a bunch of magazines again, I realized that I needed to distinguish between features and reviews.

Now, feature articles do lots of gushing. I think their underlying claim is, "this is an exemplary design, which everyone in the field would probably appreciate as an excellent example." Of course, identifying and being able to make use of excellent examples is a very important aspect of being a designer and a design critic, so there is nothing particular dubious about this stance.

That said, I've seen lots of more negative writing, and that is in the review sections. Not all magazines have reviews, but those that do critique design in a much more traditional sense, as in the following excerpt from a review of a new type face, called Emmy, written by Step Inside Design magazine's Hermann Puterschein:

Emmy isn't elegant, certainly isn't sophisticated, and it's not even very pretty. It does, however, have an honest, childlike charm.

Obviously, this--and most of Puterschein's and others' reviews--is not gushing!

I will continue to maintain, though, that design features and design reviews, though they tend to differ in tone, both commonly orient themselves to offering rational explanations of the je ne sais quoi of a design, its organic unity, its chic + useful innovation, and so on. One difference, though, and this is visible in the Puterschein quote just above, is that reviews critique the extent to which a design achieves these goals, and the extent to which in (not) doing so it is (not) of use to designers; in contrast, the features tend to take the affirmative as a given, and explicate how so.

So, to try to get a closer look at specifically critical language, I suspended feature articles from consideration and focused exclusively on reviews. I highlighted passages that struck me as interesting, in one way or another, from the point of view of importing design criticism into HCI. Put another way, I tried to find things that a design critic might say that (a) is of some value to me as a designer and (b) is something a social scientist practicing social science probably would not say. In that way, I could start to tease out contributions from criticism that can complement (but not replace) contributions from social science.

This post presents a number of those quotes and the reasons I found them interesting.

I'll start again with Puterschein, this time on a type face called ITC Intro:

Its tall ascenders and sweeping descenders give the design an elegant and sophisticated aura, but there's also a brushy, almost dashed-off quality to the script.... The design abounds with distinctive character shapes, from the unusual tail of the q to the baseline curve of the I to the loosely curved stroke of the g.... [The type face] has energy and movement, as if the brush that drew it was just lifted from the page.... Its sinuous capitals could easily double as initial letters; combine them with an Old Style text face and the results will be striking.... Also, because it is unusual, Intro should be used sparingly.... Use Intro for brief headlines or for a handful of words on an invitation or poster.

There are a number of different types of statements here. Some get at a very subjective reaction on the part of the critic; "aura," "almost dashed-off," "energy and movement"--the critic is interpreting the type face. His interpretation would be difficult to validate empirically, and yet any of his readers seeing the type face would at the very least understand where he is coming from. He does substantiate his interpretation by pointing to very specific elements of the artifact, such as descenders and baseline curves. Finally, he orients the review to design, by prescribing ways that designers can use this type face (and presumably ones like it) well, that is, in their own designs, which themselves aspire to organic unity, gestalt, a je ne sais quoi, etc. Thus, in spite of the different sorts of statements, none of them ventures far from the orienting goal of offering a rational, though not empirically validated, explanation of one's subjective, yet expert, response to the artifact.

Such strategies are not anomalies, but in fact are quite common in design writing. Here is Daniel Jewesbury writing a review of an exhibition of Darren Almond's photography, this one from Source magazine.

Darren Almond's series of moonlit landscapes, which suggestively reference ... prehistory and mythology, are made using long exposures under the light of a full moon.... In fact, they're not straightforward "moonlit" scenes at all...; in these brightly-illuminated views, both time and space are made strange.... Most obviously, the details of his images are rendered soft by the exposure time.... In certain cases, the image looks as if it might have been made through gauze, and the softness is reminiscent of painting.... There are also unexpected shifts in the colour spectrum....

This passage (and I obviously edited it down quite a bit) shows a relentless to-and-fro between an ineffable visual effect Jewesbury is trying to describe, and the production technique used to cause it. At the interpretive extreme are global metaphors: myth and prehistory. We then have specific explanations of a photographic technique. Finally, we have intermediary metaphors, which help bridge between objective technique and subjective interpretations: made as if it was shot through gauze or maybe like painting. This attempt to rationally explain a culturally complex subjective interpretation is at the heart of criticism.

So far, my examples have emphasized relationships between the form of a design and its meaning. Indeed, this is a common strategy in all criticism that I have ever seen; doing it well requires expertise in both the formal realm of the design (especially technique) and the cultural significance of that artifact's whole field of design.

But there are other strategies, such as this one, written by Nancy Roth (also in Source) about an exhibition of photographs by Hans-Peter Feldman featuring 101 photographs of people, one each at 6 months, 1 year, 2 years, 3 years ... 100 years old.

The photographs are hung in a single horizontal line, in order of increasing age, so that a visitor looks at them one after the other, at a tempo that generates the idea of a biography. And suddenly, it becomes clear that the specific details of these photographs matter much less than their success in building, out of such simple materials, the very abstract idea of "a life." More generally, one begins to wonder whether in fact Feldman uses photography to propose mental events--to re-enact the process of building complex concepts out of many concrete instances.

I spent a long time on this passage. I originally marked it as an example of criticism focused on the user (in this case, the viewer). That is, the whole passage is not based on the artifacts themselves, nor does it tell us about the photographer. The orientation of this passage is the mental process of the viewer. As someone trained in comparative literature, I have written many passages about the effect of XYZ on the reader, and what the reader realizes as she reflects on Proust's use of X, or the depiction of Y in Milton's Paradise Lost. etc. This form of criticism is very familiar to me.

What gave me pause, having spent a couple years among social scientists, was this: just who is this viewer that is having this mental process Roth describes? Is Roth suggesting that these photographs cause this particular sequence of thoughts in viewers? If we interviewed 100 viewers of this exhibit, would a statistically significant sample of them describe their thought processes like this? Because if the answer is no, and it surely is no, isn't this just the kind of fuzzy and muddled thinking that social scientists so stridently object to? Taken literally, Roth's statement probably is borderline nonsense. To "restore" it as legitimate knowledge in the scientific sense, we probably would need to do a hundred interviews (indeed, this is exactly what Czikszentmihalyi and Robinson did in their work on the psychology of aesthetics).

But there is nuance to this; Roth is writing in a short-hand that people trained in design and the humanities recognize. Roth is not talking about a sample of viewers. Roth is talking about herself, but she is doing so in a special way. She is not talking about herself as an ordinary human being, with parents, perhaps children and siblings, favorite colors, fetishes and phobias, and so forth. Rather, she is talking about her reaction as a professional critic, as someone who is highly trained in interpreting cultural artifacts, such as art photography. She is saying something like this: "Someone with a background in photography and criticism, who is immersed in this culture, who knows its history and has seen thousands of similar examples, might have the following chain of thoughts when experiencing, appreciating, and reading this collection of art: ..." That's cumbersome, hence the rhetorical stand-in of the hypothetical "viewer" who has all these thoughts.

What I'm saying is that Roth is modeling the act of reading these photographs. She is not representing an empirical state of affairs (e.g., the "content" of the photographs that she has "decoded"); she is showing us a way to think productively about a complex cultural artifact, which (once again) ties objective characteristics of the design (such as the number of paintings and their linear arrangement) to the subjective yet productive (critical, inspirational) responses and readings that afficionados and professionals have to these.

So far, I have shown lots of artifact-centric examples, and a non-empirical user-centered example, all of which are common in design, art, literary, and music criticism, if not HCI. Here is an example of a different type of strategy, a socio-cultural strategy, from David Evans, reviewing an exhibition by Alexander Rodchenko for Source magazine:

[The Rothchenko collection in this exhibition] is a Postcommunist perspective not in the sense that it seeks to divorce aesthetics and politics, but in the sense that it assumes, like Eric Hobsbawm, that the Soviet era is well and truly over. Only now, it seems, can Rodchenko be appreciated as a specifically Russian master.

I don't know enough about 20th century Russian photography to say anything sensible about this argument itself. But I will point out a formal characteristic: artifacts here are interpreted as belonging to a corpus of an individual photographer, and he himself is interpreted vis-a-vis his participation in historical cultural styles that are themselves entangled with each other: Communist style, Postcommunist style, and Russian style. Don't ask me what distinguishes these three (except the fact that in Communist style, aesthetics and politics are apparently "married"), but each style is a lens through which to interpret certain photographers, and through them, their works. When making this kind of argument, the elements that make up a photograph (e.g., the article cites his subject matter, captions, and subtitles) are meaningful not in themselves, but rather as typical or atypical of a socio-cultural-historical movement--in this case, the tension between communism and Russian national identity during the twentieth century. The viewer is not foregrounded here--the viewer hardly exists at all! So again, we have a different lens for criticism by looking at designs and designers as symptoms of a particular era or cultural context.

I have one last example to share. This is from Colin Graham's review of an exhibition by Irish photographer Bill Doyle (Source magazine):

Doyle's gently photojournalistic eye looks at Dublin, over several decades, with an urban lyricism that tends to see the best even in the worst of the city. His Aran Islands are a spare, heroic, masculine place, and are treated with reverence.

Doyle's street photography is recognisably in the tradition of European photography, though the sharpness and self-reflexivity of, say, Cartier-Bresson's irony, is not readily apparent in Doyle's work. Perhaps a more important influence on his work is early- to mid-twentieth century American urban photography in the vein of Strand or Walker Evans....

The approach here does not closely read individual photographs, nor does it particularly emphasize production technique. Instead, talks about a collection of photographs' collective style. This style, though, itself is described less as a set of explicitly named formal features, and instead is described as the embodiments of individual photographers' oeuvres. If you, like me, don't know what Cartier-Bresson's irony looked like before you read that paragraph, you're not any wiser after reading it, either. Here, Cartier-Bresson isn't an historical individual, who was born in such-and-such a year; Cartier-Bresson is shorthand, the name of a style.

So in this type of critique, design is made by individual artists, and these artists participate in networks of other artists. The artists themselves embody (and give name to) certain styles. If you know those people and their styles, then these sentences probably are quite meaningful.

I also want to point out the opening sentence, which I'll repeat here: "Doyle's gently photojournalistic eye looks at Dublin, over several decades, with an urban lyricism that tends to see the best even in the worst of the city." What exactly does "gently photojournalistic eye" mean? How about "urban lyricism"? What is the "best" and "worst" of the city? How can, as the next sentence asserts, an island be "masculine"? Taken literally, this sentence is nonsense. I certainly would not want those as coding categories for a visual analysis of a collection of Flickr images. Perhaps they could be operationalized in a way that would make such a study possible--but that operationalization is not offered here! Instead, what is offered is an educated, subjective response, and then a string of rich associations, metaphors, and comparisons, which to the right audience (in this case, I'm afraid I'm not really in it) is evocative and ultimately verbally expressive of the most subtle and nuanced aspects of this art.

Evocative descriptions are certainly a contribution to our understanding of these design and/or art works. And evocation can come from many places--the artifact itself and its internal language, the history of production and design choices, the genealogy of design styles, the interpretive process of a work's community, and even the national origin, gender, race, or ethnicity of the designer, the critic, and/or the viewer. Their contribution is to expand our own capacity to appreciate the cultural, semantic, formal, emotional (etc) complexity of human interaction through and with art and design--and not just appreciate it, but begin to articulate it.

If we can't, or don't bother to, articulate these responses, how can we evaluate, teach, or improve design beyond easily measurable features, such as usability, and get at what we ultimately care about most, which is human experience, enlightenment, social bonding, identity and belonging, magnanimity, and empathy, to name a few?

Continue to Part 6.

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]]> http://interactionculture.wordpress.com/?p=534 Fri, 13 Jun 2008 19:28:06 +0000 jeffreybardzell http://interactionculture.wordpress.com/?p=534 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 wanted to say for this segment. I have taught composition for years and have a lot in general to say about that, but that wasn't really the right direction for this post. So, to be perfectly honest, I am a little less certain of what I am saying here, but it is a blog post, so I will put something out there, and perhaps later I will be able to iterate on it and make it better.

As a starting strategy, I decided to go back and read a bunch of criticism. Not theory (i.e., abstract philosophical reflections on interpretive strategies, such as "semiotics" or "new historicism"), but actual criticism, in which a critic talks about actual, explicitly named cultural artifacts. I started with Roland Barthes' Mythologies, because, well, that collection of short critical essays on everything from soap to Greta Garbo's face is kind of an intellectual comfort food for me. As fun as that was, I realized that Barthes pop culture criticism was a little too far away from design criticism, not in the artifacts considered, but rather in the gist of his criticism, which was to expose cultural "mythologies" (often bourgeois values foisted on everyone as if they were natural, with a particular emphasis on the role of language in making that possible), whereas design criticism is typically more focused on the aesthetic response of its intended audience/user.

So my next step was to go to Barnes and Noble and buy a bunch of design magazines: indesign, Objekt, I.D., Architect, and Case da Abitare (which also gave me an excuse to practice my rusty Italian). There were others (this was one pricey Barnes & Noble trip). So I wanted to see how design writers write about design. Where there were interviews, I wanted to see how the designers themselves explained their designs. The goal was to see, in simplified and clarified form, what design discourse looks like as a discourse. Who is it written for? How long is it? What does it talk about? What are its central themes? And above all, how does it differ (both textually and epistemologically) from social scientific writing?

HCI as a field traditionally writes within the social science paradigm. As HCI increasingly embraces design, and here I am opining a bit, it seems to me that HCI seems to continue to want the familiar form of social scientific writing but amplified with the new content/insights of design-oriented thinking. The thing is, and here is a rant for another day, the form of social scientific writing carries with it epistemological positions that are appropriate for social science, but not necessarily appropriate for design critique. To say this another way, if you want to see legitimate design critique, you (HCI community) have to develop literacy in another paradigm of writing. Because when critique is translated into social science (which is how most critical approaches to HCI get past the gatekeepers), while it may certainly have its own rigor, value, and contributions, it has become something other than critique.

Briefly, the classic social science publishable paper looks more or less like this: introduction and literature review, methodology, results, discussion, conclusion. There is nothing wrong with this structure and I am not attacking it. But it makes fundamental assumptions about the type of work being presented, and it foregrounds a certain kind of intellectual rigor (namely, formally executed empirical research). If, however, one brings to the table a different kind of intellectual rigor (say, criticism), one either must shoehorn the contribution into this template and thereby play to one's own weaknesses (criticism is hard to explain in terms of a formal execution of a "proven" methodology), or one must resist the template and risk alienating an audience whose respect is best earned through excellent use of the template.

OK. So how did designers talk about their designs? How did design writers write about design?

Obligatory disclaimers paragraph! Obviously, the many critiques I read were diverse in their themes and approaches, so I'm simplifying. Also, note that magazine critiques are not academic and they are generally very positive (even gushing--I think one of their cultural functions is an intellectualized form of marketing and promotion, but I'm going to leave that alone for now).

Good design is not something one really tries to understand with empirical precision. Instead, designers and design aficionados "develop and eye for" good design, much like (to borrow an example from my colleague Erik Stolterman) a wine lover develops a taste for good wine, or a literature enthusiast develops a sense of what makes a great novel or poem. Now a good work of culture is often described as having a "je ne sais quoi," an I-don't-know-what, that is, something that you can't express but which makes it good. A central problem of the social aspect of design (from merely expressing appreciation to developing product lines or teaching design in universities) is that good design is ineffable; it can't be put into words. But to be socially useful, it must be put into words.

And so one of the core contributions of the critiques I read was to try to get behind this je ne sais quoi and try to explain rationally why a design has the aesthetic effect that it has. One article described a major house remodel. It described the original construction, including building materials, spatial form, historical context, and historical style. It described the new design, by explaining its process. For example, it talked about conflicts and the decisions (and their grounds) that led to a resolution. It spoke of both form and function, but more often than not about how they harmonized (blurring, rather than accenting, the distinction between them). It talked about the use of color, and the cultural associations of the colors (e.g., white = pure). It talked about the designer and noted that his designs recall the style/influence of an earlier designer. Here are the final lines of the article:

The house is still relatively modest in size.... However, for [the homeowners], the internal spaces, together with the garden, seem more than adequate. "Space is all relative. It's not just the size of the space. It's how they feel."

From the point of view of positivist science, the last line, "it's how they feel," is cognitively empty. What could "it's how they feel" possibly mean? And yet, it's clear from its position (the closing words of the article) that it not only means something, but in fact it encapsulates all that has come before it and offers a satisfying conclusion. Now, I'm not advocating that design discourse should tolerate muddled writing. I am saying that aspects of the aesthetic response to design, which is shared by designers and design aficionados, are both ineffable and yet also shared.

So this blog series is subtitled "How to Do It," and now I feel some pressure to say something fairly explicit and directive. I'll try. One major strategy in design criticism is to attempt to rationally explain the je ne sais quoi of a design. To do so, one attempts to show how the design has (to borrow a phrase from literary theory) "organic unity." Now, the origins of this unity are incredibly diverse:

• Form and function
• The cultural semantics of individual design elements, such as colors
• The tendencies, history, and semantics of its materials
• A design as a physical record of a process of decisions (like an exposed cliff shows the history of sediment that composes it)
• A design as an instance of one or more styles
• A design as an instance of a designer's work (where the designer is also an instance of a history of designers and styles)

The contribution of the critique is to make these and similar issues visible and explain how they relate to each other to compose the organic unity of the design, which in turn presumably helps demystify the je ne sais quoi. And that in turn facilitates practical and useful communication about something (a design) that is difficult to put into words, because of its culturally embedded complexity and the wholly (and ineffably) subjective nature of an individual's experience of it. To be able to perceive and analyze these different design issues or characteristics requires expertise and a certain kind of intellectual rigor (perhaps above all, an erudition of similar artifacts). But again, claims about any one of these issues (e.g., the meaning of a color, the influence of rococo on a given interior designer, the "feel" of "warmth" given off by a given material), let alone claims that assemble them together into an interpretation, would be daunting to evaluate as truth-claims, in the social science sense. They are not conclusions derived from data obtained by following a proven methodology; neither are they tightly derived inferences from the data itself. They constitute an expert's interpretation.

Perhaps the skill of writing critique is also ineffable. Perhaps the best advice I can give is for anyone who wants to be able to add criticism to her or his interaction design research repertoire is to read a bunch of criticism! I hope that this post gives my readers an idea of what to look for when they read design magazines, London Times book reviews, and other criticism hot spots.

Continue on to Part 5, in which I explicate lots of quotes of actual design criticism.

Los medios masivos –gobernados por enormes corporaciones de negocios– actúan como reguladores del orden social, propagando las “tendencias” del diseño y la moda, las artes y las ciencias, el espectáculo. Difundiendo las noticias y modulando la realidad se va estableciendo la jerarquía y el orden de importancia de los temas que le “interesan” al público masivo. En este contexto, los medios masivos actúan como verdaderos puntos de fuga de la información. El sentido y la misión para la cual fueron creados en su origen ha mutado a una función inversa. La sobresaturación de información provoca un vacío, una anulación de la eficacia, una perdida de sentido de los mensajes. Esto genera una considerable perdida de energía. El mensaje se reduce hasta desaparecer.

Un modelo de cybersespacio
¿Que es el cyberspacio? ¿Cuáles son sus límites? ¿Cuándo comenzó? ¿Hay un ciclo “natural” de las cosas virtuales?
Lo primero que podemos afirmar es que –al igual que nuestro universo real– el cyberspacio se encuentra en proceso de expansión. Sus limites se extienden, los objetos digitales se reproducen y se proyectan hacia el infinito.
Dado que el tiempo y el espacio son un objeto único, irregular, deforme y en expansión, los actos (los hechos) del cyberspacio tienden a expresarse en diferentes niveles de materialidad, en la sutil escala entre lo Real y lo Virtual. La posición de deslizamiento mutante de los objetos digitales cuestiona la idea de la existencia de un centro. En la estructura de la trama digital, lo real no siempre está del lado de la maquina.
La importancia de un objeto digital –como la de cualquier otro objeto– es relativa a su posición en la estructura. Su valor es función de su relación con otros. La Bolsa de Capitales es llamada “el mercado de Valores”. Y efectivamente de eso se trata; de valores, no sólo de dinero.

“La famosa fuente del Xerox PARC, en la cual la fuerza de la corriente de agua refleja el comportamiento del mercado de valores a partir de los datos que llegan por Internet en tiempo real, ¿es el ejemplo de la escultura pública del futuro?”
Lev Manovich

El espacio/tiempo se reconfigura a cada instante. Se gana velocidad, desaparecen las distancias. Los objetos se diluyen en la in-materialidad. La desaparición, la aceleración, la relativización del tiempo y la distancia. El cyberspace es la representación extrema de la figura del espacio-tiempo curvado o “deformado” por la distribución de masa y energía en él presentes (Einstein).

Así como el universo tiene su inicio en el Big Bang, el cyberspace tiene el suyo: en su novela Neuromancer, William Gibson (1984) describe un futuro en el cual la conexión en red de millones de computadoras hace posible que los personajes habiten ambientes virtuales. Para darle un nombre a ese futuro, introduce un nuevo concepto en el universo del lenguaje: el “cyberspace”. En esta palabra se sintetiza con fina precisión lo que será la sociedad interconectada y global.

Pasados 20 años desde su formulación, esta metáfora –como la realidad– se ha extendido y multiplicado. El estado de las cosas de la Sociedad Global de la Información ha superado todos los cálculos. En la actualidad, ninguna de las acciones humanas se articula por fuera de la trama de la Red. Esa extensa galaxia de computadoras, hubs, servidores y bases de datos se ha convertido en el Sistema Nervioso Central de la sociedad contemporánea.
La tecnología –que por fin ha abolido el tiempo y las distancias– permite ahora que un obrero de Nike en Indonesia tenga que trabajar cien mil años para ganar lo que gana, en un año, un ejecutivo de Nike en Estados Unidos.

En tanto fuente inagotable de información, la Red soporta el movimiento de valores de toda la economía mundial. Del pago de una cuenta de luz en un cajero automático, a la venta de acciones de millones de dólares en la Bolsa de Tokio.

Los teléfonos celulares han tenido enorme protagonismo en los atentados de Atocha (Madrid), al ser utilizados como detonadores. Es el mismo dispositivo que posibilita a la gente comunicarse con sus seres queridos a la distancia, sacar fotos, u operar con el banco.
La biotecnología genética experimenta con los cruces de cromosomas, en la búsqueda de un mejoramiento de la “vida artificial”. Nuevas vacunas y medicamentos van mejorando eficazmente la lucha contra las enfermedades. Al mismo tiempo, las clonaciones y mutaciones genéticas efectuadas sobre plantas, animales y humanos van construyendo un paisaje artificial, peligrosamente semejante al real. Lo siniestro.

La inteligencia artificial hace posible que la cabeza de un misil “sepa” con precisión cuál es su target, a dónde debe ir una vez que es lanzada. Eso no impide que cada tanto se cometan “errores lamentables” o “daños colaterales”(léase: masacre total), como cuando la caída de un misil en medio de una fiesta de casamiento en un pequeño pueblo de Afganistán, en el transcurso de la campaña de Bush por la captura de Bin Laden.

La existencia de la Red da lugar a infinidad de comunidades virtuales, sociedades y transacciones diversas. También permite comprar, vender y distribuir pornografía, drogas y armas. El mercado negro y la marginalidad también han ganado su lugar en el universo digital. Y su lugar en ese universo es de un enorme poder gravitatorio.

El espacio mediático y la cultura digital
Las constelaciones de estrellas, los planetas y asteroides del espacio digital giran en diferentes órbitas y a distintas velocidades. El avance de la microelectrónica y la digitalización ha creado nuevos satélites artificiales que modifican radicalmente el entorno cotidiano, generando un nuevo “medio ambiente” global.

“...La digitalización y la convergencia tecnológica han producido un nuevo medio ambiente global e interconectado en los medios de comunicación (MEDIA). Para referirnos a este nuevo medio ambiente usamos el concepto de Espacio Mediático (MEDIASPACE)”
Kari-Hans Kommonen
ARKI/MEDIA LAB UIAH/ Finlandia

El Espacio Mediático es el nuevo medio ambiente global de la llamada Realidad. ¿Que significa esto? Simplemente que todas las comunicaciones, intercambios y desplazamientos que se producen entre la gente están mediatizados.

La trama del espacio mediático invade todos los ordenes de la vida. Esto obliga a reformular cuestiones centrales de la estructura y el modo de funcionamiento social, económico y político de la sociedad actual y a reflexionar sobre el lugar que ocupa el sujeto en este contexto.
El sujeto como espectador, su viejo rol en la cultura audiovisual y mediática clásica, es sustituido en los new media por la figura del “usuario”. Esta figura trae incorporada la idea de un sujeto activo, emprendedor. Sea como consumidor o como productor, el sujeto debe interactuar. Esta apelación al sujeto como artífice de su propio destino encubre una trama en la que sin duda debemos actuar, pero en la que –en definitiva– ya está todo decidido de antemano. Otra puesta en escena para representar el pseudo ejercicio de la libertad en la sociedad global. Alea jacta est. La suerte está echada.
Los límites del cuerpo se desdibujan, su ubicación en el espacio es variable, incierta. El sujeto adquiere prolongaciones artificiales de todos sus órganos. Todos los sentidos son “amplificados” por la intervención de diversos aparatos, mecanismos, sistemas. (c