HCI and the Essay

Sorry I haven’t been as active on this blog of late; I’m going up for tenure soon, and blogging doesn’t seem to count for much. (Even though I have to wonder how blogs stack up to conference presentations in terms of scholarly impact.)

Anyway, I recently composed a position paper that started as a rant on this very blog. The topic is on the essay and HCI, and specifically why HCI ought to embrace–rather than marginalize–the essay as a contribution type.

Download it here. (PDF, 84 kb)

Interaction Criticism: How To Do It Handout

My 7-part series “Interaction Criticism: How To Do It” is among the most popular hits on this site. As of now, it is also spread across 7 different posts, some of them with their own comments, all of them with their own blog clutter.

As a long overdue service to readers (and also to help me get motivated to revise it and send it somewhere as a proper paper), I have compiled all seven parts, ever so lightly edited them, and now present them in a single downloadable form. Hopefully, it is more user friendly now.

Bardzell – Interaction Criticism: How To Do It

UPDATE: The above link was broken for a while, but it has since been fixed.

CHI2009 Interaction Criticism and Aesthetics

Below please find links to the paper and slides that I presented at CHI2009 in Boston on “Interaction Criticism and Aesthetics.” It was a great experience for me, and I hope this paper and these slides help us move HCI’s cultural agenda forward!

Paper (ACM digital library, subscription required)
http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?doid=1518701.1519063

Slides (PDF, 13 MB, no subscription–should download right away) UPDATE: This URL was dead for a while and has now been fixed.
http://dl.getdropbox.com/u/1874332/InteractionCriticismAndAesthetics.pdf

Thanks to the many people who helped me with this!

The Essay and HCI

In my recent post on discourse analysis versus close reading, I got into a discussion in the comments on the origin of the critic’s understanding and the role of subjectivity, objectivity, and so forth. In the course of that discussion (and I’d like to thank Jeremy Hunsinger for his part of the discussion that helped clarify this for me), I realized that there are really two aspects of the problem I am talking about. The first aspect is the method or set of interpretive strategies that leads the text analyst to a certain point of view, and the second aspect is the structure of the expression (i.e., paper) in which this analysis is articulated and defended.

So my original gripe in that post is that people in HCI sometimes seem to think that unless one does some form of coding, one’s textual analysis doesn’t deserve the name, and one is instead merely advancing an opinion. The point I’m advancing in this post is its corollary: Unless one writes a recognizable scientific paper (intro, lit review, methodology, results, discussion, conclusion) one likewise runs the risk of being seen as merely advancing one’s opinions or writing (as one reviewer once accused me) like a journalist.

Discourse Analysis vs. Close Reading

Introduction

Textual analysis is fundamental to many kinds of research, from psychology to literature, philosophy to information science. Not surprisingly, different strategies have emerged from within the various disciplines that do textual analysis, and naturally these strategies reflect the epistemologies of the disciplines from which they emerge. And as long as one stays insular to one’s own discipline, there isn’t a problem.

But as soon as a field claims the mantel of “interdisciplinarity,” it faces a dilemma: to protect and preserve what is known to work, or to open itself out to alternative ways of knowing. Now, both of these impulses are in themselves legitimate in themselves, but as they enter everyday life (e.g., the writing, reviewing, and editing of papers), they sometimes appear in clumsy ways. Some of these clumsy ways are as follows:

• Epistemological bigotry: This happens when someone asserts (often without meaning to) that she or he knows the right way and everything else is “fluff” or wrongheaded. In HCI, scientism is often confused for science, to the detriment of both HCI and science.
• Piecemealism: This happens when someone injects a small piece from one tradition uncritically into another, without recognizing that a piece might not represent the whole from which it is drawn, nor recognizing that that piece might be at intellectual odds with the rest. In HCI, I see this with “critical” approaches to HCI where a single concept is ripped from a complex tradition, such as poststructuralism, and applied to traditional design approaches to, say, mobile phones or Web applications.
• Equivocation: This happens when two or more groups of people use the same word in completely different ways, without seeming to be aware that their use is not “natural” or universal. In HCI, “aesthetics” seems to be a word that has almost no relationship to the 2,500 year old tradition of aesthetic theory, as I’ve ranted on before.

All of these involve a combination of dogmatism and muddled thinking. While scientism–by which I refer to as a fetish for scientific ways of knowing, placing it above other forms of intellectualism–is dogmatic and often intellectually muddled, I would stress that neither dogmatism nor muddled thinking is scientific. Scientism so-defined is bad science.

Two Takes on the Hermeneutic Circle

Lately, a lot of my intellectual energy has been devoted to issues that one way or another pertain to the notion of the hermeneutic circle. The following is an effort to develop some clarity on it.

Defining the Hermeneutic Circle

Just so everyone knows what I am going on about here, let me first attempt a definition, and then I’ll develop the concept in two different directions. The hermeneutic circle refers to the situation in which when we encounter a text (i.e., any cultural phenomenon) we can only understand it (i.e., make sense of it) with reference to other texts, and in turn our understanding of these other texts is modified by our understanding of this text.

In other words, to understand a given expression, we must understand the language in which it is written.  “Language” here means more than English or Chinese. For example, to understand an expression such as Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra, one must have some competence with Western tragedy in general, Shakespearean tragedy in particular, Roman history, poetry (e.g., meter), Renaissance culture, and so forth. Yet these linguistic contexts are all made out of other texts, which can only be understood the same way. We face just such a problem in HCI when we interpret and/or evaluate an interaction: the criteria by which we evaluate or interpret an interaction are determined by concepts and theories ingrained in our field, and these in turn are derived from, among other things, interpretations and evaluations of other interactions.

In this post, I want to explore two takes on the hermeneutic circle, a pessimistic view and an optimistic view. I will also make at least token efforts to relate this discussion to HCI.

Aesthetic Interaction Slides

Last week I had the pleasure of giving the keynote address at the Instructional Systems Design conference held in Bloomington, Indiana. My topic was “aesethetic interaction.” Several people afterwards asked for a copy of my slides, so I am posting a PDF here (they were done in Apple Keynote). Here is the link:

Presentation Slides (PDF, 14 MB)
UPDATE: This link was broken for a while but has since been fixed.

Also, there is an archive of the video stream. Note that the color on the slides was messed up on the live stream. That URL is here:

Presentation Video Archive

Which “Aesthetics” of Interaction?

I was pleased to discover in my mailbox last week a copy of the double issue on the aesthetics of interaction in ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction (TOCHI). I immediately flipped through the Table of Contents and skimmed the articles. For those who don’t know, TOCHI is a top-tier journal in our field, and the Table of Contents does not disappoint. I realized that for many, this special double (!) issue on the aesthetics of interaction represents in some ways the state of the art.

Nonetheless, as I browsed the journal, I also naturally perused the references for each article. My first reaction was that the referenced articles were heavily derived from technology literature, especially the HCI community, lots of psychology and sociology, and a generous amount of new media literature. I found surprisingly little reference to philosophical aesthetics, which outside of HCI is the mainstream of aesthetic thinking. Philosophical aesthetics includes the philosophy of art and beauty, and its major modern thinkers include Beardsley, Carroll, Dickie, Danto, Eagleton, Gadamer, and Shusterman among others. These thinkers in turn are standing on the shoulders of an aesthetic tradition that arguably goes back to Plato, Aristotle, and Longinus, but which picks up momentum in the 18th century and forward, and includes Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, Hume, Kant, Schopenhauer, Bell, Langer, Collingwood, and so on.

The closer I looked, the more I was struck by the divide between mainstream aesthetics and HCI. I decided to collect some numbers to illustrate my point.

Grounded versus Speculative Reasoning in HCI

As readers of this blog are well aware, HCI is at an interesting cross-roads. The history of the discipline is fundamentally scientific, with primary inputs from psychology and computer science. The future of the discipline appears minimally to include cultural, with the rise of affective, entertainment, domestic, social, and other culturally dense forms of computing. In its main venues, from CHI to Interactions magazine, it is crying out for approaches that will help interaction designers and HCI researchers work seriously on problems like the experiential qualities of interaction, interaction aesthetics, and so on.

I consider myself one of many voices trying to respond to that call. And perhaps one of the greatest challenges this agenda faces is the unspoken but omnipresent expectation that whatever solutions are offered will meet similar standards of scientific “rigor” that have been in place for decades. One problem, of course, is that culturally relevant knowledge is not necessarily the same kind of knowledge as scientific understandings of problem spaces.

Another problem, perhaps even worse, is the normalizing notion that traditional science has a monopoly on rigor and “serious” practices of knowledge production. This is not asserted explicitly, as a form of intellectual bigotry, but rather it comes out unconsciously, through habits of mind. And the goal of this post is to expose and subject to critique that habit of mind.

Getting Under My Second Skin

This morning I finally got around to watching the much vaunted Second Skin trailer about MMORPGs.

I feel that the framing of the whole thing is wrong. Though virtual worlds have objective dimensions (the code, the UI, the subscribers, the paratext–by which I mean forums, blogs, guild sites, etc.), “virtual world” is also an intellectual construct, a label for an understanding of a phenomenon. This trailer constructs this concept in a way that I think is counterproductive.