CHI2015: Pierce and Colleagues Offer Critical Take on "Critical Design"
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To the casual reader, the fact that the term "critical design" is slipping into the HCI vernacular might not seem like a big deal. But HCII Ph.D. student James Pierce and his co-authors of "Expanding and Refining Design and Criticality in HCI" would argue differently. In fact, their paper received an Honorable Mention at the Association for Computing Machinery’s CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI2015) held last month in Seoul, Korea.
While most people associate the CHI conference with papers on the latest and greatest research into hands-on ways humans interact with technology, the conference also offers a forum for academic discussions important to the field. In the case of Pierce and colleagues from Cornell University, the University of Washington, Georgia Tech and the University of London, that discussion centered around the term "critical design." According to the authors, "critical design" has a specific meaning in the academic arts-influenced design community. Coined in the mid-1990s, critical design has been called the design of "products for the mind." Deliverables resulting from critical design may not literally work, but will instead raise questions about how design influences the shape of everyday reality. The work is more motivated by social, political and intellectual concerns than clearly defined user or consumer needs and wants.
But "critical design" has also been entering the HCI research vocabulary, but as a catchall for something more far-ranging and diverse than the term's artsy design origins imply. Pierce and his co-authors fear that this divergence may cause problems, specifically for referring coherently and precisely to the original term — which still remains a key touchpoint in HCI discourse.
To solve this conundrum, which goes well beyond semantics to emerge loudly into HCI theory, Piece and his colleagues suggest two strategies. One is to articulate the broad range of design practices that convey an authorial voice with critical dimensions as an alternative to (but not a replacement of) user-centered design. The second is to shape a variation of design criticism that better meets more arts-driven, academic design ways of speaking and knowing as an alternative to (but not replacement of) design criticism oriented to ontology and taxonomy.
But why is all of this important? Because design intersects with so many fields in HCI, and accommodating design is important.
"Accommodating design within CHI [computer human interaction] is not trivial," the authors write. "The ways designers produce and disseminate knowledge are often different from, and perhaps confounding to, engineers and behavioral scientists, as well as social scientists and humanities scholars. Embracing design practice and discourse may require us to rethink, for example, how we conduct peer review, select and prioritize publication formats, and set conference registration fees. The good news is that the HCI community appears ready and willing to take some of these challenges on. … We believe these efforts will be strengthened with the development of a richer design discourse within CHI to which we hope these considerations will contribute."
Read the whole paper on ACM's digital library.