Interaction criticism

Jeffrey Bardzell

Past HCI

In HCI, commonly used representations include empirical data sets about users and use situations.

Correspondence theory of truth

Phenomenon

“out there”

Rational, pragmatic

Representationalism

Nielsen’s Ten Usability Heuristics(double correspondence)Users’ understanding of system state = Actual system state

Ways how information made available to people = Information convention

Norman’s mental modelUser’s model = design model (ideal)

GOMSEvaluation approach that predicts task completion times

This Predictive analysis is followed by an empirical study.

Normative, empirical

Present HCI

UX, aesthetic interaction, affective computing, intimate interaction, values-centered design and other areas dealing with human selfhood, social justice, and everyday life – can really match with “out there”

“Interaction design needs to improve its awareness of the symbolic level of mood and meaning, of sociability and civility.” – Crampton Smith

In this realm, finding match between the thing and reality would be hard and accepted as (inter-)subjective. -> expert-subjective

It should be addressed in the way of art and humanities, criticism.

Criticism

Criticism is based on holistic, non-reductive understanding.

1. The work’s qualities

2. Emotional intellectual experience to the work

3. Awareness of the moral, ethical consequences

4. Knowledge from other experts

5. Comparable exemplars

6. Work’s position in history and location

7. Relevant theories

->subjective & non-perspectival

HCI needs interaction design which enables design practitioners to engage with the aesthetics of interaction, helping practitioners cultivate more sensitive, insightful, imaginative critical reactions to designs and exemplars.

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}By these, guaranteed a individual subjectivity.

Experts develop, share, and evaluate their aesthetic judgments.

Criticism in humanities

Analytic philosophy– Tightly scoped

– Carefully formulated

– Rigorously evaluated

– Formal & symbolic logic

– Cognitive approaches to disciplines

Continental philosophy– Holistic

– Cultural

– Political

– Semiotics, Feminism, Marxism and so on.

Both traditions offer valuable resources to interaction criticism and HCI more generally and that HCI, as a field, should not take sides in their disputes.

5 claims in aesthetic and critical theory

1. Art and/or criticism educates our perception and/or directs acts of cognition.

2. Criticism and aesthetic response are inseparable; that is, criticism does not precede or stand over aesthetic response.

3. Critical activity involves a back-and-forth movement between pointing out material particulars and relating them to interpreted wholes.

4. Art/criticism is enlightening.

5. Art/criticism is ethically uplifting.

Art and/or criticism educates our perception and/or directs acts of cognition.

• Perception is an active, cultivatable skill, not merely the cause-effect result of sense data hitting a receptive sense organ. (as a goal, common outcome of art)

• By improving this skill, we improve cognition itself.

• Both in analytic philosophy, continental philosophy, we can find the claim.

Criticism and aesthetic response are inseparable; that is, criticism does not precede or stand over

aesthetic response.

• The discursive form of expert aesthetic knowledge is inseparable from the personal and subjective activity of engaging with a work.

Critical activity involves a back-and-forth movement between pointing out material particulars and

relating them to interpreted wholes.

• Aesthetic beauty can be found only in the union of material works and human life worlds.

• As large interpretations change, the material features which are pointed to will change too.

• Example: Triumph of the Will– The initial critical response inspired by its vision

– The British wartime reworking the film’s vision to mobilize political opposition to it

– Devereaux’s retrospective analysis in service of aesthetic philosophy

These 3 different interpretations all emphasize different material particulars to build up their overall interpretations.

Art/criticism is enlightening.

• The long-term outcome of claim1, that art enhances our skills at seeing is claim 4.

• We can improve knowledge not just by developing better formal methods of data collection and analysis. We can also improve it by being more experienced and sensitive embodied thinkers in the first place.

Art/criticism is ethically uplifting.

• The enhanced sensitivity makes people more imaginative about and empathic toward others’ sufferings.

• As criticism educates our perception and cognition, we become habitually more perceptive to the intersubjective responses and values of others situated in ours and other cultures.

Interaction Criticism

This cross-pollination would have important benefits, such as helping HCI community better assess its own broad cultural impact.

Lumino

http://gizmodo.com/5421983/lumino-project-next-generation-lego-crossed-with-microsoft-surface/all

Interaction designer as Creator

• Design entails intentional change, interpreting a design artifact with design intention and designer agency in mind is an obvious and important strategy.

• HCI has adopted a Hirsch-like position.(need to uncover the author’s intention)

For Lumino, the creator’s intention is technocentric. Significance reference to specific human needs is absent form their goal.

->open to interpretation/pure technology

For the rhetorical strategy, they used simple descriptions, diagrams, photos and so on. + DIY section in website->readers to join the researchers position.

• Authorial excess: author’s intentions are shaped by broader cultural trends.->human-made artifacts are more significant than the authors can ever intend.

Interface as cultural artifact

• Under the banner of semiotics, cultural artifacts could all be analyzed as concrete implementations of cultural languages.

For Lumino, the visual language can easily be tied up to many other cultural forms.(domino, the pleasure of manipulating blocks, tangram-like pattern, futuristic)

->unity in variety(science fiction)

• Visual languages->what they mean(single form)

User as reader

• Reader-based approaches stress the significance of the reader as a someone situated in a time and place.

• The aesthetic/artifact is inherently situated in human subjective response.

For the Lumino,Ideal reader

1. Members of the HCI community2. Lumino end users3. Members of DIY community

The rhetoric of Lumino is too vague, the users cannot fully realized.

The social context of HCI

• The social context of interaction design demands a central place in interaction criticism.

For Lumino

1. Historical context of Lumino’s production (male-dominated)

2. Social act in itself and a force that directs subsequent acts. (changes the community - e.g. contributing to a theory of interaction, solving a technical problem in a highly replicable way, critiquing and them addressing a limitation of MS soft and etc.)

Conclusion

• Description, explanation(scientific)• Description, interpretation(humanistic)• Criticism offers theories and rigorous

processes that are relevant to the work of contemporary HCI.

• HCI community should view in criticism and humanist theory.(how we experience, perceive, understand, and feel about our experiences with technology.)

My critique

• Very analytic approach with quotation and other humanistic theories

• Interesting approach to see the interpretation in perspective of art and humanities

• Fully agree with the idea (the importance of interaction criticism)