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)
http://tinyurl.com/czuh57

Thanks to the many people who helped me with this!

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)

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.

Species of Interaction Criticism

One problem that is likely impeding the development of critical approaches in HCI is equivocation. Equivocation occurs when different meanings or uses of the same word are used interchangeably. “Criticism” appears to be just such a word, and the origin of this post was to offer some fundamental distinctions among different uses of “criticism” in the hope of helping prevent this sort of confusion.

Some quick examples will make the point clear. The following are examples of “criticism”:

• A book or film review in a newspaper
• A “close reading” of a work of Shakespeare, to explicate its greatness (etc.)
• A “close reading” of a magazine ad for spaghetti, to develop a theory of semiotics (e.g., Barthes in Mythologies)
• When a peer offers a critique to a design mid-process (e.g., studio critique)
• The use of a case study as a deep, representative example
• Theorization surrounding an experiential quality accompanying a cultural artifact
• Comparison of a given example with a rubric, heuristic, or other evaluative framework
• The act of constructing such an evaluative framework out of many examples
• The development of an overarching explanation of a large group at a given time or place (e.g., postmodernism, Victorianism)
• The development of a comprehensive philosophical system (e.g., Kantianism)

One might quibble that I have included an item or two I shouldn’t have, or failed to include an item I should have. Be that as it may, I hope the central argument holds: we use the word “criticism” in drastically different ways. And therefore, terms such as “critical HCI,” “interaction criticism,” and the like are subject to widely different understandings, unless given proper context. And unless we create that context, we are likely to be mired in confusion.

Criticism = Design = Criticism

Here are some juicy quotes by French New Wave filmmaker and critic Godard on the relationship between criticism and filmmaking.

As a critic, I already thought of myself as a filmmaker. Today [1962, after he started directing films] I still consider myself a critic, and in a sense, I’m even more of one than before. Instead of writing criticism, I make a film, but that includes a critical dimension. I consider myself an essayist, producing essays in the form of novels or novels in the form of essays: only instead of writing, I film them.

All of us at Cahiers [Cahiers du Cinéma, a film magazine especially important in the 1950s] thought of ourselves as future directors. Frequenting cine clubs and the Cinémathèque was already a way of thinking cinema and writing about cinema. Writing was already a way of making films, for the difference between writing and directing is quantitative not qualitative.

Godard’s influence on film is undeniable, but he has also seen his share of controversy. Be that as it may, he is hardly alone in the sentiment that criticism and artistic/design activity are two sides of the same coin. One of the greatest literary critics of the nineteenth century was also one of its greatest poets: Samuel Taylor Coleridge (who wrote “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” and whose criticism coined the phrase, “willing suspension of disbelief”). Epic poetry is seen as essentially a critical endeavor since Virgil’s Aeneid, which “rewrote” Homeric epic for Augustan Rome; likewise, Ovid, Statius, Dante, Milton, and Joyce likewise rewrote Virgil and their epic forebears for their own national literatures (ancient Roman, late Roman, medieval Italian, Renaissance English, and modern Irish, respectively). Legendary critic Harold Bloom developed an entire theory, dubbed the “anxiety of influence,” and developed in two books, in which he argues that poets’ relationships with their literary precursors–and their need (a psychoanalytic “anxiety”) to distinguish themselves from them–shapes their writing.

Interaction Criticism: How to Do It, Part 7

Readings: Going Off on Your Own

Continued from Part 6 of the Interaction Criticism series, which starts here.

Acknowledgment: Many of the ideas and readings cited throughout this series and particularly in this post reflect the research and contributions of my colleague and spouse, Shaowen Bardzell.

I certainly have enjoyed composing this series of posts, and I hope to revise it into a paper soon. In the meantime, I have gotten lots of requests for places to start reading, and so this final post in the series I offer some resources for you to explore.

There are two categories of works I will mention here. First, there are works in the field of HCI that take critical perspectives. Second, there are general and introductory works to critical theory and aesthetics.

Epistemology of Criticism

I realized tonight, on a walk with my spouse, that much of what I am doing this summer is documenting the epistemology of criticism. In other words, I am trying to render explicit the ways that critics come to know whatever it is that they come to know, and to compare that with how social scientists do the same.

There are several reasons why this activity is important. First, the two epistemological positions are sufficiently incompatible that both sides don’t “get” each other. To critics, social scientists can come off looking intellectually lazy, provincial, and mechanistic. To social scientists, critics can come off looking arrogant, totally subjective, and fluffy (not in the good way, like stuffed animals, but in the bad way, that is, lacking rigor). Second, my field (HCI), a traditionally social science-dominated field with an increasing interest in cultural categories, such as “experience” and “aesthetics,” is the site of a collision between these two epistemologies, and believe me, it’s not going well so far. And third, I’m trying to be one of the voices of translation, if not conciliation. That is, it may be too much to ask a social scientist to think and act like a critic and vice-versa, but it seems to me quite reasonable to ask a social scientist or critic considering contemporary, culturally embedded interaction design to have a basic comprehension (and with it respect) of the opposing epistemological position. We need to get away from the name-calling.