One of the key papers that I keep coming back to is Jeffery Bardzell’s work on interaction criticism (most recently discussed in his 2011 Interacting With Computers paper Interaction Criticism: An Introduction to the Practice). His background is in the humanities, so (along with doing a lot of cool studies on the edges of HCI), he is able to bring a understanding of people to HCI that’s also relevant more generally in design (he notes that notes that current work on HCI aesthetics pits it against mainstream aesthetics, when in fact they might feed each other.)
The most important (for me, anyway) element of Bardzell’s work is his claim that criticism furthers perception: in other words, that the act of evaluation is also cognitive, and helps heighten it. (In this respect I believe is carries on from Merleau-Ponty’s claim that the world is infinitely rich and that we learn to be able to perceive more of its richness).
A summary of is paper is below
Barzell’s 5 theses of art and criticism in human knowledge production:
- Art and/or criticism
- educates our perception and/or
- Directs our cognition [Graham: ‘the value of art is neither hedonic, aesthetic, nor emotive, but cognitive that is to say, valuable as a source of knowledge and understanding’]
- Criticism and aesthetic response are inseparable; that is, criticism does not precede or stand over aesthetic response [e.g. Eaton ‘good criticism results in a fuller, richer aesthetic experience by ferreting out the aesthetic value of objects and events’]
- Critical activity involves a back-and-forth movement between pointing out material particulars and relating them to interpreted wholes [Dewey talks about this, 1935 footage of Hitler’s rise and Nazis — intially shown to great triumph, then edited by the Allies to foster opposition]
- Art/criticism enlightens us [Eaton: ‘aesthetic experience is not valuable just because it is pleasurable; it is valuable because people who partake of it become more sensitive, more imaginative’]
- Art/criticism spurs us to worthwhile action [Rorty: criticism and theory do not exist to describe the world but rather to change it]
Bertelsen and Pold ‘Criticism as an Approach to Interface Aesthetics’ (2004)
- Stylistic references
- Standards and conformance to tradition
- Materiality and remediation
- Genre
- Functional versus cultural dimensions of an interface
- Representational techniques
- Challenges to user expectations
- Capacity for unanticipated use
[Barzell notes that these are too specific and heterogenous to be coherent ‘as an artifact-centric framework, it also has much more to say about the design itself than about design intentions, human responses to and uses of it, and its more general role and situatedness in culture.’]
McCarthy and Wright the ‘four threads of experience’: sensual, emotional, compositional, spatio-temporal.
[ ‘felt experience’ is a useful term but one that is only partial as it is strictly within the subjectivity of the viewer/user, cutting off analysis of the materiality of the artifact — a similar criticism of Kant]
Löwgren and Stoltermann (2004) replace ‘knowledge’ with ‘thoughtfulness’ and ‘reflective mind’. Characterising design theory as ‘knowledge that can liberate the designer from preconceived notions’, and propose four resources:
- A sensibility regarding the qualities of designs and design processes
- A developed language, [Barzell: by which I think they mean a technical analytic vocabulary]
- Reflective thinking, which emphasises the interpreting subject’s awareness of themselves in the development of one’s own thoughts
- Retrospective reflection, a speculative activity that explores the ‘arguments and ideas that could explain a design’
[Doesn’t give guidance as to how to study artifacts or the subjective experience of everyday users, but clarifes the characteristics of critical sensibilities]