Jeffrey Bardzell

What is "critical" about critical design?

Critical design is a research through design methodology that foregrounds the ethics of design practice, reveals potentially hidden agendas and values, and explores alternative design values. While it seems to be a timely fit for todays socially, aesthetically, and ethically oriented approaches to HCI, its adoption seems surprisingly limited. We argue that its central concepts and methods are unclear and difficult to adopt. Rather than merely attempting to decode the intentions of its originators, Dunne and Raby, we instead turn to traditions of critical thought in the past 150 years to explore a range of critical ideas and their practical uses. We then suggest ways that these ideas and uses can be leveraged as practical resources for HCI researchers interested in critical design. We also offer readings of two designs, which are not billed as critical designs, but which we argue are critical using a broader formulation of the concept than the one found in the current literature.

Towards a feminist HCI methodology: social science, feminism, and HCI

With substantial efforts in ubiquitous computing, ICT4D, and sustainable interaction design, among others, HCI is increasingly engaging with matters of social change that go beyond the immediate qualities of interaction. In doing so, HCI takes on scientific and moral concerns. This paper explores the potential for feminist social science to contribute to and potentially benefit from HCIs rising interest in social change. It describes how feminist contributions to debates in the philosophy of science have helped clarify relationships among objectivity, values, data collection and interpretation, and social consequences. Feminists have proposed and implemented strategies to pursue scientific and moral agendas together and with equal rigor. In this paper, we assess the epistemologies, methodologies, and methods of feminist social science relative to prior and ongoing research efforts in HCI. We conclude by proposing an outline of a feminist HCI methodology.

Interaction criticism and aesthetics

As HCI becomes more self-consciously implicated in cul-ture, theories from cultural studies, in particular aesthetics and critical theory, are increasingly working their way into the field. However, the use of aesthetics and critical theory in HCI remains both marginal and uneven in quality. This paper explores the state of the art of aesthetics and critical theory in the field, before going on to explore the role of these cultural theories in the analysis and deployment of the twin anchors of interaction: the user and the artifact. In concludes with a proposed mapping of aesthetics and criti-cal theory into interaction design, both as a practice and as a discipline.

Critical design and critical theory: the challenge of designing for provocation

Constructive design research is a form of research where design activity is a central research activity. One type of constructive design research is critical design, which seeks to disrupt or transgress social and cultural norms. Critical designs advocates have turned to critical theory as an intellectual resource to support their approach. Interestingly, critical design processes remain under-articulated in the growing design research literature. In this paper, we first explain why critical design is so hard to describe as a design practice or process. We then describe two critical design case studies we undertook and the effects we observed them having when place in the field. After sharing our breakdowns and breakthroughs along the way, we offer reflections on designing for provocativeness, the value of deep relationships between researchers and research participants, and the need to plan for and go with a fluid and emergent research plan --- with the goal of helping clarify critical design as an approach.

Interaction criticism: An introduction to the practice

Though interaction designers critique interfaces as a regular part of their research and practice, the field of HCI lacks a proper discipline of interaction criticism. By interaction criticism I mean rigorous interpretive interrogations of the complex relationships between (a) the interface, including its material and perceptual qualities as well as its broader situatedness in visual languages and culture and (b) the user experience, including the meanings, behaviors, perceptions, affects, insights, and social sensibilities that arise in the context of interaction and its outcomes. Interaction criticism is a knowledge practice that enables design practitioners to engage with the aesthetics of interaction, helping practitioners cultivate more sensitive and insightful critical reactions to designs and exemplars. Benefits of such an engagement can include informing a particular design process, critiquing and innovating on design processes and methods more generally, developing original theory beneficial to interaction design, and exposing more robustly the long-term and even unintended consequences of designs. In this article I offer a synthesis of practices of criticism derived from analytic philosophy of aesthetics and critical theory, including the introduction of five core claims from this literature; I outline four perspectives that constitute a big-picture view of interaction criticism; and I offer a case study, demonstrating interaction criticism through each of these four perspectives.

The rogue in the lovely black dress: intimacy in world of warcraft

In this paper we present a critical analysis of player accounts of intimacy and intimate experiences in the massively multiplayer online role-playing game World of Warcraft (WoW). Our analysis explores four characteristics that players articulated about their virtual intimate experiences: the permeability of intimacy across virtual and real worlds, the mundane as the origin of intimacy, the significance of reciprocity and exchange, and the formative role of temporality in shaping understandings and recollections of intimate experiences. We also consider the manifest ways that WoWs software features support and encourage these characteristics.

Making cultures: empowerment, participation, and democracy - or not?

Making has transformed from a fringe and hobbyist practice into a professionalizing field and an emerging industry. Enthusiasts laud its potential to democratize technology, improve the workforce, empower consumers, encourage citizen science, and contribute to the global economy. Yet critics counter that in the West, making often remains a hobby for the privileged and seems to be increasingly co-opted by corporate interests. This panel brings together HCI scholars and practitioners active in making, handwork, DIY, crafts, and tool design to examine and debate the visions that come from maker cultures.

Structures, forms, and stuff: the materiality and medium of interaction

Though information is popularly, and often academically, understood to be immaterial, nonetheless, we only encounter it in material forms, in books, on laptops, in our brains, in spoken language, and so forth. In the past decade, HCI has increasingly focused on the material dimensions of interacting with computational devices and information. This paper explores three major strands of this research—tangible user interfaces, theories of computational materiality, and craft-oriented approaches to HCI. We argue that each of these offers a formulation of the materiality of interaction: as physical, as metaphysical, or as tradition communicating. We situate these three formulations in relation to debates on the nature of media, from philosophical aesthetics (the ontology of art, in particular), media studies, and visual cultural studies. We argue that the formulations of materiality, information, and meaning from HCI and those from the humanities have deeper underlying similarities than may be expected and that exploring these similarities have two significant benefits. Such an analysis can benefit these differing threads in different ways, taking their current theories and adding to them. It also serves as a basis to import philosophical art concepts in a robust way into HCI, that is, not simply as prepackaged ideas to be applied to HCI, but rather as ideas always already enmeshed in productive and living debates that HCI is now poised to enter—to the benefit of both HCI and the humanities.

The Proper Care and Feeding of Hackerspaces: Care Ethics and Cultures of Making

Communities of making have been at the center of attention in popular, business, political, and academic research circles in recent years. In HCI, they seem to carry the promise of new forms of computer use, education, innovation, and even ways of life. In the West in particular, the maker manifestos of these communities have shown strong elements of a neoliberal ethos, one that prizes self-determination, tech-savvy, independence, freedom from government, suspicion of authority, and so forth. Yet such communities, to function as communities, also require values of collaboration, cooperation, interpersonal support-in a word, care. In this ethnographic study, we studied and participated as members of a hackerspace for 19 months, focusing in particular not on their technical achievements, innovations, or for glimmers of a more sustainable future, but rather to make visible and to analyze the community maintenance labor that helps the hackerspace support the practices that its members, society, and HCI research are so interested in. We found that the maker ethic entails a complex negotiation of both a neoliberal libertarian ethos and a care ethos.

How HCI talks about sexuality: discursive strategies, blind spots, and opportunities for future research

The topic of sexuality has been increasingly researched inside the field of HCI. At the same time, and for many reasons, research gaps remain. In this paper, we present a critical analysis of 70 works on this topic spanning the past two decades to understand how we as an academic field talk about sexuality. We use Foucauldian discourse analysis to identify and analyze the various rules of knowledge production on this topic inside our field. By doing so, we expose not only existing gaps in current research literature, but we also gain an understanding of why some of them exist. We suggest some opportunities to make the field more amenable to this kind of research and point out future research directions on sexuality inside the field of HCI.