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.

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!

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.

This calls to mind my regularly repeated rant that in CHI, the top conference of our field, there are eight “contribution types,” and these include “Development or Refinement of Interface Artifacts or Techniques”; “Systems, Tools, Architecture, and Infrastructure”; “Methodology”; “Theory” and others. The eighth of eight is “Opinion.” Now, clearly Opinion is the slot for essays; its accompanying description uses the term “provocative essay.” Because many trained scientists seem to hold the position that subjective = opinion = lack of rigor = not knowledge, I wrote a post distinguishing between opinion and judgment, and I’ll let that do its work and not restate it all here. Suffice it to say that I don’t believe many in HCI have a robust understanding of the nature and contribution of the critical essay.

What I want to do in this post is highlight the nature and goals of the essay as a form of discourse. It is structurally, substantially, and even epistemologically distinct from a typical scientific paper. This is not to suggest that one is better than the other, but rather only to suggest that essays cannot be evaluated on the same terms as scientific papers (and vice-versa, of course). Incidentally, Wikipedia has an entry on the essay, so if you want something more comprehensive, go read that. But I am going to share some quotes from one of my favorite essayists, Phillip Lopate. I offer this not as a final word on the essay in HCI but just to help HCIers recognize one when it lands in their laps and hopefully also to be able to evaluate them fairly.

Following are a bunch of quotes pulled from the beginning of Lopate’s essay, “In Search of the Centaur: The Essay-Film,” included in his collection Totally, Tenderly, Tragically. The essay considers why the essay-film isn’t more common than it is, and it works through definitions of its key terms and contemplates both films that broadly meet the criteria and those that are like essay-films but are not. But I’m not worried about the essay-film here, and so I focus only on Lopate’s attempts to define the essay:

the essay offers personal views. That’s not to say it is always first-person or autobiographical, but it tracks a person’s thoughts as he or she tries to work out some mental knot, however various its strands. An essay is a search to find out what one thinks about something.

Often the essay follows a helically descending path, working through preliminary supposition to reach a more difficult core of honesty.

This gets right at why I think critical essays are subjective and why it is so important not to fetishize objective understanding. I am not here rehearsing the Kantian argument that there is no such thing as objective knowledge that has taken such prominence in postmodernism. Rather, I am stressing a form of knowledge production whose source is not in empirical reality at all, but rather which is fundamentally embedded in the subject’s sensemaking, interpretive, and reflective practices. This sort of knowledge cannot be found in external reality, and so it is absurd to suggest that objective, empirical, or scientific approaches would be more effective in unconvering it.

I also want to stress the temporal unfolding of such knowledge: it is not a static representation of a state of affairs; it is a process of engaging, which has emergent outcomes. The essayist is likely to disagree with herself over time; indeed, Foucault’s response to critics who pointed out the inconsistencies in his work was to say (very roughly paraphrasing): “Of course! I write in order to change myself. At the end of a book, I am not the same person that began it. It would be a boring waste of time otherwise.” Back to Lopate on the essay:

Montaigne’s “What do I know?” is a mental freedom and cheekiness in the face of fashion and authority. The essayist wears proudly the confusion of an independent soul trying to grope in isolation towards truth.

This quote underscores the non-replicability, non-objectivity of the essay. The essayist has a voice, which is cheeky, confused, groping, truth-oriented but not arrived. To dismiss the essayist as merely providing her point of view utterly defeats its purpose. One can of course demand an accounting for that point of view (and the earlier quote, which stressed the temporal working out of a knot, suggests at least what that looks like), but the cultivation and expression of a point of view is arguably the essay’s raison-d’être.

Adorno, in “The Essay as Form,” saw precisely the anti-systematic, subjective, nonmethodic method of the essay as its radical promise.

Do I really need to say this? What Adorno is obviously contrasting the essay to is science. This is by no means a rejection of science! It is, rather, an effort to develop and articulate alternative practices of knowledge production, which are both non-scientific and nonetheless rigorous and legitimate.

Note also the word “radical” in that sentence. Radical implies an effective activism that actually will lead to substantive, desirable change in the world. Criticism generally has a progressive orientation, which seeks to complement the often conservative outcomes of science (that is too rich a claim to defend here, but short version: whose agenda does science typically serve?).

Whatever twists and turns occur along its path, and however deep or moral its conclusions, an essay will have little enduring interest unless it also exhibits a certain sparkle or stylistic flourish…. Freshness, honesty, self-exposure, and authority must all be asserted in turn. An essayist who produces magisterial and smoothly ordered arguments but is unable to surprise himself in the process of writing will end up boring us. An essayist who is vulnerable and sincere but unable to project any authority will seem, alas, merely pathetic and forfeit our attention. So it is a difficult game to pull off. Readers must feel included in a true conversation, allowed to follow through mental processes of contradiction and digression, yet be aware of a formal shapeliness developing simultaneously underneath.

I have spoken about the importance of the critic’s voice, and here Lopate develops the idea and puts some flesh to it.

I now give Lopate the final word, and he, in turn, passes the final word onto the great Marxist critic György Lukács. As you read this final quote, in light of the other quotes that precede it, consider how this relates to a field like HCI, with its interface design, user research, and growing awareness of its own socio-cultural responsibility (e.g., sustainability, aesthetics, etc.):

An essay is a continual asking of questions–not necessarily finding “solutions,” but enacting the struggle for truth in full view. Lukács, in his meaty, “On the Nature and Form of the Essay,” wrote: “The essay is a judgment, but the essential, the value-determining thing about it is not the verdict (as is the case with the system) but the process of judging.”

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.

In this post, I will talk about discourse analysis versus close reading. Both are strategies of textual analysis. Both have disciplinary rigor. Both have legitimate benefits. And yet often when I do close reading, I am attacked on the grounds that I am not being “systematic,” not “coding,” and/or just putting forward my “opinion.” And I want to just scream out: I’ve read Virgil in Latin, Proust in French, Dante in medieval Italian, Joyce in whatever language he wrote in: I don’t need you to tell me how to read! But that is self-expression. It doesn’t solve the broader problem, which is that the rigor I bring to text analysis seems to be literally invisible to these reviewers. Instead, 12 years (!) and a doctorate in a Ph.D. program in Comparative Literature comes off as me just putting forward my “opinion.” I need to address this.

Ironically, and no doubt to the detriment of my tenure case, I think a lot more people read my blog than any of my papers, so I want to use this platform to define both discourse analysis and close reading with the hope of making very clear the following:

• They take different epistemological positions. That means that their way of knowing–their assumptions about how to derive meaning from texts, what meanings are supposedly there in texts, the approaches you use to access them–differ.
• They embody different forms of rigor, and if it is your job to evaluate rigor then it is your responsibility to know how to recognize different strategies of textual analysis and to know how to recognize and evaluate their actual or lack of rigor.
• Their outputs are different. What you learn from discourse analysis is not the same thing as what you learn from a close reading, and each approach lends itself to certain kinds of claims–and also fails to lend itself to other sorts of claims.

My Thesis Statement

All of this leads to my thesis statement, and to make sure no one misses it, or if you just skim this post and only see on thing, then let it be this:

1.  Discourse analysis and close reading are NOT interchangeable

And that implies this:

2.  If someone does a close reading, it does not follow necessarily that they should have done a discourse analysis instead.

With my thesis out of the way, I’m ready to blog-defend it. (A “blog defense” means that this is probably a half-baked and half-assed defense; your recourse is to take me on in comments.) Before I start, I want to share one other value: I try to be generous with concepts, theories, and methodologies. That means that I will attempt a fair-minded summary of both approaches, even though everyone reading this knows which one I like better and am more likely to practice (that said, I have done discourse analysis). But my personal preferences are just that: personal preferences. They do not amount to universal claims or pretenses. Stated directly: I respect discourse analysis as much as I respect close reading, even though I personally practice one more than the other.

On Discourse Analysis

Discourse analysis is a scientific and empirical strategy of textual analysis. At its most basic level, it entails a methodology along these lines:

1. Identify a phenomenon you are concerned with, whose significance is at least partially embodied in texts. Example: FOX, CNN, and MSNBC written news coverage of Obama; mommy blogs; letters to the editor published in your local paper on topic X; Amazon.com customer reviews of Y.
2. Identify the totality of texts available, and identify a significant and representative sample of the whole.
3. Develop a coding system that lets you tag instances of a significant textual feature (e.g., the presence or absence of a feature in a given unit of text).
4. Preferably with multiple people, code the texts using the framework. (I’m hereby skipping summary of establishing intra- and inter-coder reliability, but if you are curious, go read Krippendorf who lays all this stuff out nicely).
5. When you are done with step 4, you now have a numeric representation of your sample. This can now be analyzed statistically.

What this sort of analysis gets you: If you do it well, you have a bona fide empirical snap-shot of your phenomenon. You are in a position to claim what has been said in those texts. You are in a position to observe patterns that are explicitly present, but which may have been hard to see just by reading all the texts. You are also in a position to discover relationships among those patterns: female writers were more likely to A, while male writers were more likely to B; MSNBC coverage was more friendly to liberals, FOX coverage to conservatives, CNN coverage to lipstick celebrities.

Limitations of this analysis: Strongly empirical approaches such as this are very good at exposing what is there. They are less successful at exposing what is “between the lines,” because in a literal way, what is between the lines is not “there” to be found or represented. Now, obvious stuff between the lines is easy enough to unearth–FOX is conservative, MSNBC is liberal, CNN is vapid–but the deeper, juicier stuff can’t be accessed this way. Discourse analysis alone cannot also get at context very well; who said it and why? I’m sure discourse analysis practitioners will contest me on this, but I mean context in much broader and more radical way than I typically see in these sorts of papers: psychoanalytic, ideological, and other complex cultural and/or subcultural contexts are extremely difficult to see using a positivist strategy like discourse analysis.

[Update]: See comments below for a discussion of whether this is a good or fair summary of discourse analysis.

On Close Reading

The term “close reading” is descriptive, not exactly technical. I might have said “humanistic reading” or “interpretive reading” or something like that. Examples of what I am talking about are acts of criticism. Here I don’t mean critical theory but rather close interpretations of single “texts” (“text” here understood as any cultural artifact): Sontag’s interpretation of photographic portraits of herself; Butler’s interpretation of the ethics of torture photographs in the Bush years; Bloom’s interpretation of Plato; Bazin’s interpretation of de Sica’s Bicycle Thieves; Barthes’ interpretation of a photo on the cover of Paris Match; and so on.

A close reading doesn’t involve a set methodology and as such it is very hard to describe. Foolishly perhaps, I nonetheless attempted it here. But the gist of this sort of approach is that an expert (which I will leave undefined here) engages with a text with great care. This engagement typically entails a number of activities: multiple readings/viewings of the text; situating the text in its social and historical contexts; deconstructing the text using a variety of critical strategies (e.g., from Marxism, feminism, poststructuralism, postmodernism, structuralism, reception theory, psychoanalysis); bringing to bear what, if anything, everyone else has said about that text, including interviews with the author/creator, its critical tradition, similar texts (e.g., by the same author/creator); and so forth. Note that this sort of approach is holistic and relies for its success on the expertise of the expert doing it; it is unique, individual, and subjective; it does not follow any disembodied abstract methodology but rather the logic of the scholar-expert in whose hands it is being executed.

What this sort of analysis gets you: A close reading of this sort explores and exposes far more sensitively the complex cultural embeddedness of the text. It gets at matters of aesthetics, craft, and ethics in profound ways. It is capable of revealing much about a text and a community that is neither explicit in the text nor even known to its community. A spectacular example of this is Dick Hebdige’s Subculture: The Meaning of Style, whose analysis of the punk subculture explores the specific historical and operational details of the xenophobic working class underpinnings of punk’s emergence and war on mainstream mass culture. At no point does Hebdige claim that his analysis represents the conscious expressed point of view of a subculture; rather, he explores and reasons about what the unconscious, unspoken point of view seems to be, where it comes from, and what evidence justifies this line of thinking.

Limitations of this analysis: Close readings are strongly inductive and speculative in nature, so what it won’t get you is confidence that you have an objective and correct representation of external reality as it is. Rather, a close reading situates the text against a network of complex ideas and reflections, with the hope of cultivating our capacity to appreciate and understand the source text. Close readings of aesthetic works often call attention to theorization of art to help expose (or even create) its cultural significance–in the most robust possible sense, and for better and/or worse–in the critic’s society. As I have said elsewhere, a critic often models the act of reading, not to reproduce a static understanding in the reader’s head of what is in the critic’s head, but rather to encourage the reader to use similar interpretive strategies both in the original text and in subsequent texts of interest to the reader.

Summary

If you interview 1,000 people coming out of a theatre and transcribe the interviews, you can use discourse analysis to get a real sense of how that film was liked, understood, perceived, etc.

If you read a critical essay about that same film (and here I don’t so much mean newspaper movie reviews but rather scholarly film critiques), you will understand that film’s participation in film, mass media, and everyday culture: its craft, its ideology, its construction of concepts that matter: love, social justice, freedom, sexual liberation, identity, politics, beauty, and so on.

It should be obvious at the very least that both of these kinds of knowledge are legitimate and important, if not always to the same people. If I am a film investor, I absolutely want to understand how moviegoers perceive, experience, and evaluate movies. That is fundamentally an empirical question, and empirical strategies are entirely appropriate. If I am a prospective director, a concerned citizen, a film student or teacher, a film buff, someone who makes decisions about which films should be shown as a part of a community film festival,  and so on, then the film critic’s message is much more likely to resonate with me.

In HCI, we combine all of these audiences. We want to design stuff for commercial success. We want to design things that do what they are supposed to do. Our scientific and empirical approaches are already very good at helping us achieve these goals.

But now we also care about sustainability, felt experience, quality of life, social justice. We have Web 2.0 communities whose emergent behavior literally changes the “meaning” of a system over time. As battles between Web 2.0 communities and their software “owners” (e.g., Facebook, Second Life) have shown, it is not even clear who does or should be responsible for these systems. Thanks to APIs and SDKs, software developers from Adobe and Blizzard to Twitter and Yahoo allow users to redesign interfaces. The emergent UI results are sometimes cannibalized and implemented in future releases of the software. What, then, is an “interface” now, anyway?

These broader questions are much more complex than whether a system is usable or whether users prefer this color scheme to that one. Their complexity in large part lies in the un-articulated and often unseen relationships between and among vastly complex phenomena, from human identity practices to social behavior, from globalisation to the history of art, from emergent user-created interfaces to the incomprehensibility of information produced by user-content creators. These issues cannot be adequately described by scientific reductionism, the way predicting task performance can be. This is not at all to say that scientific reductionism can’t contribute to our understandings in powerful ways–of course it can! But drop the scientism, HCI! It’s not going to meet our needs and it’s lousy science anyway (all dogmatism is). Good science and good critique should complement and reinforce each other. But as long as we categorically dismiss non-scientific strategies, we’re only fake-interdisciplinary and we’re going to botch our work.

And today, bad HCI is more than an unusable Web page–it is unsustainable, socially unjust, culturally irresponsible–and a significant majority of our thousand best users just might miss it.

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.

Take 1: The Pessimistic View

The hermeneutic circle seems to interfere with, if not absolutely preclude the possibility of, objective knowledge. This is so because our reasoning would seem to be circular. The only way to justify a reading (by which I mean “serious act of sensemaking”) is to point to other readings, which themselves need justification in the same way, leading to an infinite regress argument.

Another practical implication is that it is hard to enter one of these circles, since every possible entry point seems to take for granted the whole. You can’t understand Shakespeare without being in a position to understand Shakespeare; how can you get in such a position without reading Shakespeare?

Since the hermeneutic circle, on this view, is bad, we should try to break out of it. Philosopher Charles Taylor, in his essay “Interpretation and the Sciences of Man” explores this argument. He writes that one way people have tried to break out of it is by taking recourse to empirical science. Empiricism is, he writes,

a genuine attempt to go beyond the circle of our own interpretations, to get beyond subjectivity. The attempt is to reconstruct knowledge in such a way that there is no appeal to readings or judgments which cannot be checked further. That is why the basic building block of knowledge on this view is the impression, or sense datum, a unit of information which is not the deliverance of a judgment, which has by definition no element in it of reading or interpretation, which is a brute datum. The highest ambition would be to build our knowledge from such building blocks by judgments which could be anchored in a certainty beyond subjective intuition…. By “brute data,” I mean … data that cannot be questioned by offering another interpretation or reading, data whose credibility cannot be founded on or undermined by further reasoning.

On this view, empiricism (“let the data speak for itself”) offers an alternative to the hermeneutic circle, a way of knowing that is not entangled in it. We see an example of this sort of reasoning in Csikszentmihalyi & Robinson’s The Art of Seeing:

An analysis of any sort begins with a description of the phenomena under study. Yet a thoroughgoing and empirically grounded description of the aesthetic experience has been conspicuously absent from aesthetic theory–of whatever stripe–in the past. For the most part, aesthetic study has proceeded from a priori assumptions concerning what the aesthetic experience must be or the basis of the analyst’s own experiences.

So the authors are promising to do what 2,500 years of aesthetic theory have failed to do, namely, offer a rigorous description of the aesthetic experience (because apparently only empirical study is “thoroughgoing” and gets past “assumption”). They promise to replace empty theorizing with good, empirical evidence.

But pure empiricism has problems. As Wittgenstein, Quine, and other philosophers of science in the twentieth century have demonstrated, pure empiricism does not work, even in physics, let alone the human sciences. A hypothesis cannot exist without a theory already in place to give it coherence: How is the phenomenon studied? How is its data analyzed? On what basis is this hypothesis deemed important in the first place?

Additionally, Taylor notes, the brain simply doesn’t work that way to begin with, that is, pure empiricism itself entails a theory of perception that is outmoded. Finally, Taylor observes that for this kind of empiricism to work, reality itself must be structured in a certain way for it to be available to this kind of perception and knowledge building, i.e., it must be made available in a comprehensive and truthful way to human perception.

So how did Csikszentmihalyi & Robinson do? Using a grounded theory approach (note that grounded theory is based on a priori assumptions about what empirically informed theory must be), they interview nearly 70 museum curators (this “population” was “selected” based on established social science methodologies). So before they interviewed a single subject, their study itself is situated within the hermeneutic circle of empirical social science. How about their data? Their analysis of the data revealed that the curators express themselves according to four interrelated dimensions of aesthetic experience: perceptual, emotional, intellectual, and communicative. This may be surprising, inasmuch as it looks more like the table of contents of a psychology textbook than a work on aesthetics; the authors have minimally delivered on their promise of not revealing aesthetics as usual, but it seems fair to question whether they instead delivered psychology as usual.

How about the “brute data” itself? The authors offer quotes about how the curators perceived art. Here is an example: one curator describes the “color and forms,” “paint manupulation,” “dry, chalky lines,” and “stuccolike surfaces” of a painting; that sounds perceptual. The problem is interlaced among these terms were references to this work as “a perfect Cubist picture” and “that you associate with Cubist paintings.” In short, perception itself, by Csikszentmihalyi & Robinson’s own account was mediated by the hermeneutic circle: the painting was rendered perceptible to the curator on the basis of its participation in the Cubist tradition. Of course, the “Cubist tradition” refers to a bunch of subjective theorizing by artists, critics, and aesthetic philosophers; it certainly isn’t an empirically derived category. In short, Csikszentmihalyi & Robinson have not gotten out of the hermeneutic circle, as promised in their rhetoric; all they have done was empirically demonstrate that museum curators are themselves inside of a hermeneutic circle (i.e., art history), suggesting that all those dusty “a priori assumptions” that they were seeking to circumvent in fact are the basis of aesthetic experience.

Now, HCI is an empirical field, and its rhetoric sometimes resembles that of Csikszentmihalyi & Robinson. But as I have argued here, empiricism does not exempt anyone from the hermeneutic circle. Perhaps HCIers will resist this, but evidence of the presence of the hermeneutic circle in our field abounds. First, the idea that HCI is a “field”–what does that mean, if not that we all share a common general understanding (i.e., theory) of what HCI is? Such a shared theory is necessary for degrees in HCI to have meaning, for job descriptions to recruit the right sorts of people, and so on. We prefer certain kinds of research processes: empirical research is privileged over critical essays, for example. Equally, we as a field prefer certain research methods and epistemologies over others. Second, imagine a CHI paper with no references. With a pure model of empiricism, references would not only be superfluous, they would be corrupting! Yet how many of us when we submit are castigated for not having this-or-that paper in our references? This is an assertion of the hermeneutic circle (along with a second assertion that our work is outside of it). Or consider a criticism about an inappropriate reference: such a criticism amounts to a claim that the cited reference or definition doesn’t belong in the hermeneutic circle, or at least not in the way presented.

So it seems that the pessimistic view is well named; it views the hermeneutic circle in negative terms, and it is unable to get out of it.

Take 2: The Optimistic View

The optimistic view would seem to start with a few basic positions. First, pure empiricism is impossible and the hermeneutic circle is inevitable, and yet science has not faltered and dissolved. It seems that scientific progress is possible even if it is stuck within the hermeneutic circle. So, it may be that Csikszentmihalyi & Robinson’s claims to a privileged understanding of the aesthetic experience were delusional, but nonetheless they obviously offer genuine insight on how curators experience art, and in particular they reveal (even if inadvertently) how important aesthetic theory is to art appreciation, and in which sorts of ways. Above all, they help us see how a model audience appreciates art, a contribution to knowledge that benefits art educators, museum exhibit designers, art industry marketers, art critics, and so on.

A second benefit of a given field’s hermeneutic circle is that it renders itself visible. Let me explain that. Anyone remotely familiar with ubiquitous computing knows that Mark Weiser’s “The Computer in the 21st Century” was a seminal essay; everyone cites it and many people define themselves in relation to it. Because we know that this paper is a formative contributor to ubicomp, (a) we know that we need to teach this essay to graduate students in HCI; and (b) we know that anything obsolete, wrong, or brilliantly right about that essay are likely to have repercussions in ubicomp. In short, recognizing the hermeneutic circle(s) in which you operate de-naturalizes your work and renders it visible to reflection and critique. That in turn may prevent you from making dumb claims like you are going to fix the error made by 2,500 of years of philosophy going back to Plato by having your graduate students interview 67 people, and instead making claims about what your contribution actually is (e.g., help making visible how model or expert art viewers experience art).

The essence of the optimistic view, though, goes back to Gadamer (and was inadvertently given support in Csikszentmihalyi & Robinson). For Gadamer, our participation in the hermeneutic circle extends our perceptual horizons. Not only can I perceive what my senses make visible, but I can perceive the world making use of concepts that I have acquired by participating in a hermeneutic circle. We see this in the Csikszentmihalyi & Robinson paper where a curator expresses what she or he perceived in terms of Cubism. Without knowledge of Cubism, this curator may not have even noticed the chalkiness or stucco-texture of the paint. The perceptual qualities of the paint are only visible, significant, and interesting when viewed with an understanding of Cubism.

This line of reasoning obviously applies to HCI. I don’t have to reinvent “usability”; I can read about it, understand what it is, why it matters, how it has been evaluated, and it becomes a part of the repertoire with which I view, interpret, and experience a design. The concept of usability, therefore, is like an extra set of eyes, a new sense. Using Dewey’s and later anthropological notions of “experience,” I am able to reflect more thoughtfully, precisely, and substantially on my own experiences with interaction designs. This also means that HCI does not have to reinvent aesthetics, but rather can avail itself of aesthetics’ existing tradition, using it to extend our capacity in HCI to engage with beautiful, artistic interaction.

In short, the hermeneutic circle makes it possible for me to see and to participate in HCI as a field. It enables me to leverage the contributions of thousands of people in my own work, amplifying–or rather creating the very possibility of–my capacity to produce knowledge in the field. It also offers my colleagues a basis on which to critique and thereby help me improve my work. Finally, it offers all of us the opportunity to critique not just seminal papers, but the rippling of their effects across the field. In the philosophy of science, the realization that objective empiricism does not work (at least in a pure sense) led to the development of theorizing around scientific practices (such as triangulation) that seek to address the intrinsic weaknesses of pure empiricism in a way that allows empirical approaches to move forward on surer footing.

The hermeneutic circle is not a trap to avoid, but rather an opportunity to participate in the constructive development of our field. Our field, like all scientific fields, is hermeneutic, but that does not mean it cannot continue to rely on empirical strategies. It merely means that we should not be delusional about how this knowledge is produced.

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

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.

Method. I counted every single reference in the journal. I then read every single entry and marked down all instances of references that were to humanistic aesthetics outside of technology studies, including philosophical aesthetics, art history, and literary theory. I excluded all new media writings (e.g., Manovich, Laurel, Wilson) and works on aesthetics from technical conferences and publications (such as SIGCHI). I included a few humanistic sources that were tangential to aesthetics, such as Tuan’s work on humanist geography (space and place).

Results. Here is what I found:

There were 272 references in the entire double issue.
There were 22 references to humanistic aesthetics as defined above.

In other words:

8% of the references were to aesthetics in its humanistic sense.
92% of the references in this issue were to technology and social science sources.

The 8% includes repeats–Shusterman’s Pragmatist Aesthetics alone represents 3 of the 22 citations. Additionally, my own perception of that 8% was that, with some exceptions, most notably Shusterman, it was somewhat idiosyncratic. I then consulted my copy of the 850-page Oxford Handbook of Aesthetics (G. Levinson, ed.), which has a chapter devoted to the state of the art of aesthetics (P. Guyer’s “History of Modern Aesthetics”) including a  bibliographical essay and 227-item bibliography of canonical readings in aesthetics. Of the 22 references cited in TOCHI, only 5 of them (Dewey, Heidegger, Hume, Kant, and Shusterman) appeared in this bibliography; note that only one of these is contemporary (Shusterman).

What this means and doesn’t mean.

First, it is important to stress that I am not criticizing the scholarship of any of the individual essays in the special issue. Their references were extensive (272 divided among 6 papers) and both authoritative and complete as far as technological and new media aesthetics go; indeed, the special issue is a gold mine for those looking for references on technological aesthetics, quite beyond the articles themselves.

Second, my exclusion of technological aesthetics is not trivial, nor is it meant to suggest that this isn’t important literature. I didn’t count some of my favorite new media authors (including personal hero Lev Manovich) for this reason. Additionally, there was some interesting digital art discussed in this issue that fall under the broad aesthetics umbrella (not just technological aesthetics), and I did not count that either. It’s not that these are not significant voices on art and aesthetics. But my goal was to explore the relationship between philosophical aesthetics and HCI, not to suggest that the TOCHI issue on aesthetic interaction was disconnected from anything resembling aesthetics.

What this does suggest is that HCI is cut off from mainstream aesthetics, that it bases its conceptualization of aesthetics primarily on technological and social scientific notions of aesthetics.

If HCI were more directly connected to mainstream aesthetics, not only would it include mentions of important thinkers, like Kant, but it would engage directly with their ideas, as well as with the abundant philosophical commentary on them. It was the absence of the latter that surprised me most. Let me explain with a hypothetical example. If I wanted to use Kantian aesthetics in some way in HCI, I would not start by reading Kant. Rather, I would engage first in the enormous commentary literature written by scholars of Kant, who are far better both at elucidating his key ideas and also at spelling out the deeper implications of the ideas. By “deeper implications,” I am referring specifically to the sorts of things that trained philosophers and humanists concern themselves with: where the ideas came from, their weaknesses, how those weaknesses might be addressed, how the ideas relate to their original intellectual contexts (e.g., 18th century German society), how they have been appropriated and revised by subsequent thinkers, where subsequent thinkers ran into trouble, and so on. This literature no doubt would eventually push me into reading Kant, or important selections of his, but in doing so, I would be standing on the shoulders of Kant’s greatest readers and interpreters.

Conclusion. HCI has a growing and maturing literature on the aesthetics of interaction, and this is a great thing. The TOCHI special issue represents the current gold standard, and its bibliography alone is quite valuable.

But there is also an opportunity here: HCI researchers can continue to enrich this agenda by engaging directly with mainstream aesthetics. In particular, contemporary commentaries on major aesthetic philosophers are generally accessible to non-specialists and loaded with good ideas that have been examined and developed in great detail. Volumes like the Oxford Handbook of Aesthetics abound and offer intellectually mature resources to aesthetically minded interaction designers.

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.

I came up against this in the course of doing a review for CHI2009. I was asked to review a paper that I immediately recognized as a work of philosophy in HCI, the kind of work that to me is responsive to the call for a more humanistic HCI. The paper explicated several widely accepted knowledge constructs in HCI, each of which were presented as a collection of principles. The paper offered an abstract, yet reasoned, analysis of these principles, suggested the existence of a gap exposed by said analysis, and offered to fill that gap with a new set of principles.

I quite liked the paper, but not all of the reviewers agreed with me. One of the reviewers in particular repeatedly claimed that the argument was “not grounded.” (The reviewer had other — and legitimate — objections, which I am not talking about here; I just want to take on this single objection.) Initially, I inferred that the reviewer was criticizing the speculative nature of the entire argument; there was no data, no study to support it. Later, that reviewer clarified and suggested that the argument would have been better if the author’s definitions of key vocabulary had been derived from scholarly literature. Instead, in one key instance it was derived from a “dictionary” (which was implied to be lazy), and in another key instance no source was offered (which was considered to be opinion-based and arbitrary).

Now, I should make very clear that although the author was roundly criticized for using insufficiently serious sources, or no sources at all, neither the reviewer nor the meta-reviewer made any suggestion whatsoever that there was anything wrong with the author’s actual use of this terminology; they did not suggest that there was any limitation, distortion, incompleteness, conflation or any other legitimate problem with the terminology. The only thing wrong with it is that its provenance was not deemed “serious” enough. As I learned in a 100-level logic class in 1993, this argument is a logical fallacy (it depends on an “appeal to authority“). Put simply, the argument was deemed problematic not because anyone could find any fault with it anywhere, but simply because it failed to showcase the apparatus of intellectual seriousness.

As someone trained in philosophy (it was my Ph.D. minor and my dissertation, recently published by Routledge, is about the philosophy of language), I have a real problem with these objections. In logic, one is allowed to stipulate premises as a part of an argument, even far more outlandish ones than were found in this paper. And building on this stipulation, one can develop a rational argument. Obviously, anyone can reasonably question the stipulation, e.g., by saying that premise P stipulated as true is in fact not true, and therefore any subsequent reasoning that depends upon its truth is irrevocably damaged. All of that is fair game. But to say that premise P can’t be taken seriously because it came from source S, without even bothering to engage in whether premise P has any value in its own right, is just a poor philosophical response.

And therein lies the rub.

For what the other reviewer wrote was not a philosophical response. It was a response derived not from philosophy or the humanities, but rather from the social sciences (or so I infer–I don’t know who that reviewer is). And the social sciences are, for perfectly legitimate and appropriate reasons, much less speculative than philosophy. To oversimplify for purposes of clarity, social sciences are geared toward a rigorous and (as) objective (as possible) understanding of external reality, while the humanities are comparatively more oriented to rigorous critiques of knowledge / understanding itself.

Part of social science’s rigor is in “grounding.” There are two acceptable ways (well, more than two but I’m focusing on two here) to ground reasoning in social sciences: one is through the careful collection, analysis, and interpretation of data. One eye opener for me as a humanist entering HCI years ago was (to me, at that time) obsessive care with which claims were made. It seemed to me then that social scientists would only make the tiniest, safest, most conservative claims; they shied away from the bold and interesting ones that really push understanding. Now I understand why that is the case: when you are making truth claims about reality, unless you have that care, there can be serious consequences as a result of speculation not only to knowledge of a state of affairs, but also action taken based on the assumption that that knowledge is true (policymaking, design, and other human interventions intended to change our world for the better). The other acceptable way to ground reasoning is by appealing to some other authority who has already done such an analysis. In this special and limited context, appeals to authority in the social sciences are, if not logically airtight, at least able to provide the epistemological foundation required for the work of the field.

Philosophy and more generally the humanities, in contrast, are not as strongly oriented toward truth claims about the world as it actually is. Rather, they are comparatively more oriented toward changing and reconstructing knowledge. Not surprisingly, they are also more skeptical of appeals to authority. They are often at their best when they help us think in new ways, see things in a new light. Where science is comparatively more ambitious ontologically (understanding the world as it is), the humanities are comparatively more ambitious epistemologically (changing understanding itself). So the most important question of a philosophical paper about principles in HCI is not whether the argument is grounded (an ontological concern), but rather whether the paper helps us think more productively about our field (an epistemological concern). And no one can rationally evaluate whether it helps us think productively if we are dismissive of it, not on its merits as a coherent theory/argument, but rather on concerns about the provenance of particular parts of the argument.

The differences between ontological and epistemological orientations in reasoning can be seen in the diverse discourses on the body, for example. Medical researchers have recently identified a link between a gene and transsexuality. Postmodern feminists, such as Judith Butler, argue that gender is a social construct created and maintained by the gendered performances into which we all are forced to engage, and transsexuality is in Butler’s analysis powerful evidence of the social constructedness of gender. On their face, these two discourses seem to contradict each other, since how can a gene be causally linked to a social construction of knowledge? But both discourses are speaking at different levels, two ships passing in the night. Butler is not suggesting that the science here is simply wrong and delusional, and the medical researchers aren’t claiming that they know what causes a social construction of knowledge. Rather, Butler is offering an alternative explanation of gender as a means of helping all of us think more critically about the relationships between physical bodies (the male, the female) and the meanings we ascribe to them (masculinity, feminitiy, transsexuality, perversion, sickness, etc.), a concern that envelops all human intellectual activity, from medicine to literary theory.

Let me return to the CHI review. It is certainly the case that any CHI paper should be evaluated carefully for its rigor. As I have tried to show here, this particular standard of rigor (i.e., the need for every element of an argument to be grounded) applied to this paper by the other reviewer was, in my opinion, not “too high” a standard for philosophy, as if philosophy has lower standards of reasoning (!), but rather a priori the wrong standard. A philosophical argument was evaluated as a scientific argument; both its philosophical rigor and contribution were missed because it failed to meet the normative standard of scientific reasoning, even though it never presented itself as such. From a philosophical point of view, if the offending part of the argument is valid or correct, then it doesn’t matter where it came from; if it is wrongheaded, then it also doesn’t matter where it came from.

And this episode is a typical, not exceptional, example of a major intellectual problem in HCI. Normative notions of science are being used to dismiss legitimate humanistic work by the very same people who are crying out for better work on the cultural, experiential, and speculative dimensions of HCI’s enterprise. The converse is also true: humanistically marginal work is being accepted because it conforms to the veneer of scientific presentation. The result, as I have argued elsewhere, is that piecemeal and simplistic ideas from the humanities are informing HCI instead of rich and robust ones.

If HCI wants competence in the cultural dimensions of interaction design, it must first have literacy in the intellectual disciplines that specialize in them.

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.

To see what I mean, let me first lay out the statements offered by the trailer in the sequence they are offered; no statement is omitted, though some are edited down, and critical commentary from yours truly is offered in parentheses. Let me be clear: I don’t have access to what the speakers intended or their actual beliefs. I have only access to how their statements were cut up and edited. So my critique here is the way that the trailer editor is constructing the discursive space of “virtual worlds.”

• “We are in a world that is increasingly becoming atomized. We’re all isolated.” (This connects to the virtual worlds as anti-social meme, already prevalent in society and about to be reinforced by a title. It also explicitly undercuts the positive aspect of virtual worlds as bringing people out of isolation and together. I know Ted Castronova–the person quoted here–and I’m pretty sure his take on MMOs is not oriented around the concept of anti-social isolation.)
• [Titles + music] “A new world awaits … inside your computer.” (That is, it exists as code on your individual machine. Now, the virtual world could have been described as existing in the shared experiences of users, but instead it is described as existing on an individual machine. This follows and reinforces the first point: we are alone/isolated. It also stresses the mechanical aspect of online games. It would be like saying “A new world awaits … on a giant white board in a large and crowded room” to describe film.)
• “There’s so many people involved in this. Your brother might be a gamer. Your mom might be a gamer.” Graphic: “Over 50 million people play an MMORPG” (I think this is overall a positive statement. Everyone plays, not just weirdos, and I think it de-marginalizes online games)
• “The syndicate started as a guild. It has developed into a virtual community.” (To me, this is a positive statement about community and undercuts the solitary (and even loser) myth. The problem is unless you know what a “guild” is, this positive line doesn’t mean anything!)
• “People are driven to be more than what they are.” (Virtual worlds satisfy self-aggrandizing fantasies. So here is not a full blown psychosis [but that's coming, so be patient], but humans have a reality problem that games are poised to exploit.)
• “A lot of players have what they perceive as dead-end jobs. They log onto these worlds and suddenly they are someone with power.” (So gamers are real-life power-craving losers and games offer escape from their crappy reality and the masturbatory fantasy that they really are something, when in fact they are not)
• MMO players have “an obsessive drive” that is “a strange phenomenon” shared by “semi- to truly hardcore” players (i.e., MMO play is a psychosis for anyone serious or even halfway serious about participating. This psychosis moreover is “strange” so apparently it differs from addiction to television or novels.)
• “We all have our demons” … “If I had the day off, I would just play all day” (in case you missed that gameplay was dysfunctional, here is more, more, more evidence for you! We want to make very sure that you know these people are warped!)
• “My priority is her [husband points to pregnant wife]“ (here is a positive example of someone with his priorities where they ought to be. That’s good. But it clearly is the exception in this reel of dysfunctional screw-ups and one can only wonder what will happen next…)
• BAM! “I knew I was sick from playing, and I knew I had to stop. 14. 16 hours a day, easily. I would fall asleep in front of the computer. Wake up. Keep going… My whole life just fell apart. So I wanted to just kill myself.” (hope you enjoyed the non-dysfunctional soundbite just before this, because here is someone who is f#@ked up and he’ll get what seems to be the longest quote of the trailer)
• Onto online romance: a woman describes how an online flirtation became the real thing. “I’m in love, definitely.” Then she smiles and says that they “still have to meet in reality” in a few days. (I interpret this segment overall as a positive, you know, since love in general is a good thing! Other elements of the video undercut the possibility of true love though, including (a) this segment’s juxtaposition with addiction-suicide man just before her; her own claim that they will meet “in reality” suggesting that their love is not yet based in reality, and finally by later claims about virtual worlds “not existing”–which I’ll rant about soon. In this way, a positive element can be perverted into a negative one based on its position within a chain of other elements.)
• [Title + music] “Seven gamers’ lives are changed forever” (Here the uniquely transformative dimension of MMOs is emphasized. This picks up on the earlier suggestion that there is something new about online games that we haven’t seen before. Reading, TV, movies, rock music, and Internet porn didn’t change these 7 people, but games did. I wonder how 18th Century Second Skin: The Trailer looked, with clips of Jane Austen discussing her troubling addiction to reading and how it prevented her from finding a husband)
• [Silent montage of people sitting in front of their computers with headphones on.] (The imagery here emphasizes what is going on in physical reality but does so at the expense of any phenomenological understanding of the experiential reality of gameplay. The effect is to emphasize solitary inactivity, rather than the phenomenological fulfillment of the activity. Don’t believe me? How many movie trailers show a bunch of fat people sitting in the theater not talking to each other? The theater experience isn’t about sitting in a chair with plastic arms; it is about the immersive illusion of being in the film.)
• [Final titles montage + music]: “Identity, community, economy, love, addiction, redemption, achievement, suicide, griefing, gold farming, twinking, grinding, raiding, immersion, society … All in a world … that doesn’t exist” (In an obvious, meat-headed sense, virtual worlds do not exist. In every other sense, including every sense that matters, they very obviously do exist. We don’t turn off our lives to be in virtual worlds. They are a part of our real lives, and by that I mean both (1) activity in games is a part of our non-game real lives, and I also mean that (2) we bring real life into games. First: game activity exists in real life, just like a conversation during dinner or a game of Frisbee or bowling or whatever with friends is a part of our real life. When I travel, do my phone calls to my wife exist? When my accountant does my taxes “online” in Excel, does that mean my taxes no longer exist? Is the teller at Calvin Kline delusional when he lets me walk out of the store with real clothes after handing him a piece of plastic and making him give it back? Second, we bring our real lives into virtual worlds, which is why virtual worlds replicate gender, race, and sexuality issues that in theory shouldn’t even be able to be relevant in virtual worlds. But they are. Now, let me say something about that list of nouns. It is filled with both positive and negative words, which in itself seems fair enough. But which of these got the majority of the juicy cuts in this trailer? I mean, 50 million players–for how many of them is suicide relevant? But identity, which is relevant for just about all players, was just left out of this trailer except its appearance as a title at the end. Yet, speaking personally, my identity play in Second Life and WoW is one of the most creatively fulfilling activities I’ve ever done.)

It is obviously not my position that this trailer presents virtual worlds in an extremely negative way. It offers some balance. But there is a discourse in mainstream society that the major issues surrounding virtual worlds involve addiction, isolation, losers engaging in pointless fantasies, and so on. My friend Intellagirl was recently invited to be on a daytime TV show to talk about how Second Life ruins real life relationships (if I am remember this correctly; if not, I’m in the ballpark). Then we have politicians like Joe Lieberman and Hillary Clinton talking about games as addictive and violence-inducing. So there is a broad cultural construction of online games that those of us who know about the games immediately understand is fundamentally distorted and preemptive of serious discourse about them.

A documentary like this should be careful not to reinforce this counterproductive cultural construction of online games. But it emphasizes the sensational and negative aspects of online games (I’m not denying that they are there), choosing precisely the ones that reinforce the common narrative about online games. (Example: one negative aspect of online games is griefing, but griefing does not appear in this video beyond a split-second title, whereas there is this focus on 16-hours a day addiction and suicide guy.) So not only is negative content featured more strongly than positive content, but more importantly the negative content that is featured is exactly the same negative content that drives stereotypes about online games: they are for loners, they separate people from “real” life, online games are not real, online games represent the kind of threat to society we’ve never seen before, and holy shit there’s 50 million of them! That’s a lot of people with crappy jobs on the verge of suicide.

If we want to change the stereotypes and produce a more constructive discourse about online games, in which there is a broad understanding of the beauty, enlightenment, joy, sociability, and intimacy of games alongside an awareness of harassment, bigotry, and addiction, then we need to challenge not reinforce the prevailing construction of online games and use the power of film to show people how it is otherwise.

UPDATE:

Second Skin responds, sort of, with a short post about this very long post! They don’t even seem to be too mad about it, which is nice. I expect their fans will descend on me frost-enchanted 2H maces soon, though! (You thought I was going to say “pitchforks” didn’t you? Ha! I play games, too.)

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.

To help think through this problem, I moved up a level of abstraction to consider how different meanings of “criticism” might be situated in a field of possibilities in interaction design. I represent that field as follows:

The range of audiences (X axis) versus levels of abstraction (Y axis) for criticism

The X axis represents the primary audience for criticism, that is, for whom it is offered. It does not represent the position of critics themselves (who lamentably are not really represented on this graph). It ranges from laypeople to academics, and in between are professional practitioners. The Y axis ranges from particulars (i.e., individual artifacts, such as that film, or this version of the iPod, or that novel) to abstractions (such as genre, qualities, categories, and types).

It is important to note that the picture I will develop in this post represents only my take on criticism in interaction design. If one were to explore criticism in film or literature, it likely would like quite different. Much of this has to do with relationships among key categories, such as the academic, the layperson, and the professional. In HCI, the professional seems to occupy a privileged role, in that any HCI theory that fails to offer explicit take-home points for practitioners is generally considered deficient (I am merely stating, not endorsing, this point of view). In literary criticism, by contrast, the distinction between professional practitioners and academics, and for that matter, between lay connoisseurs and the latter two categories, is much less clear.

So, in the context of interaction design, criticism at the level of the layperson can be charted as follows:

Interaction criticism at the level of the layperson

A review of a piece of software, e.g., in MacWorld or Electronic Gaming Monthly, is written about a particular piece of software for a lay reader. Thus, it winds up in the lower-left corner. I put Taste in the upper left corner, because it gets at how laypeople feel collectively about all of the relevant particulars in their time. The work of Genevieve Bell (or for that matter, Shaowen Bardzell) exploring domestic spaces in non-Western homes as a prelude to domestic and/or intimate IT design would fall into this category. Maybe “taste” isn’t the best word (disclosure, for what it’s worth: I was thinking about Bourdieu when I put that there).

With that out of the way, let us now turn to professional interaction design practice. Here’s how I see criticism playing out.

Interaction criticism as it manifests for professional interaction designers.

These are all presented as ranges, because I see lots of flexibility in their application. Across the bottom is studio critique. This is where peers offer one another expert design critiques, and where designers offer their own design rationales. Toward the layperson side of the range are student applications of critique, while workplace critique is professional. (Arguably, this line could be extended further rightward; I can imagine studio critique of avant-garde design–e.g., someone like Bill Gaver or a visionary Ph.D. thesis–taking place in relatively academic settings.)

Informing studio critique are abstract evaluative frameworks, heuristics, etc. These may be more or less abstract (hence the range). Nielsen’s Web Usability Heuristics are fairly general, and one can easily imagine heuristics for Web e-commerce shopping cart usability, for example, which would extend further downward toward the particular than Nielsen’s heuristics.

I also include case studies in this group. Case studies are interesting. On their face, they would appear to be particulars, so it might be a little mysterious why I positioned them higher on the abstraction axis than studio crit. The reason is that most of the case studies I have ever seen are accompanied by an at least implicit claim that this case represents something broader (i.e., more abstract). So it is on the basis of this additional claim that I consider case studies to be at least partially abstract. I have seen them used in professional and academic contexts, hence the horizonal range.

OK, next! In the top-right corner is abstract/academic, and no one will be shocked to see what lives up there:

The abstract-academic aspect of interaction criticism features theory.

In this I am trying to represent a distinction that I consider to be very important for HCI. In the extreme top-right is philosophy and critical theory that itself has origins outside of HCI, but which is brought into HCI via HCI theory. An obvious example of this is phenomenology, a philosophical system developed in continental philosophy by the likes of Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty and appropriated into HCI by Winograd & Flores, Dourish, Sengers and Gaver, Fry, Willis, and others. Likewise, Bakhtinian literary theory has been introduced into HCI by McCarthy & Wright, Blythe, and others. Each of these HCI writers is engaging in a double-move: On the one hand, there is the contribution of new interaction design theory that has been informed by philosophy and critical theory (this is the Interaction Design Theory contribution); at the same time, there is some representation in HCI literature of what this philosophy is. That representation includes Winograd & Flores’ summary of Heideggerian concepts, McCarthy & Wright’s summary of Bakhtin, and so on. I want to stress that the original philosophy and critical theory are not represented in my picture, only their summaries and representations in HCI discourse. (The extent to which this philosophy and/or critical theory is robustly represented–and even understood–in HCI is also a matter with which we should be concerned.)

I see the Interaction Design Theory as forming a bridge between Philosophy/Critical Theory (which is academic) and Interaction Frameworks and Heuristics (which are professional practitioner-based). In a way, they are meta-frameworks, in that they offer the criteria out of which frameworks and heuristics are made. As XML is to MathML, so is design theory to design frameworks/heuristics.

My own perspective suggests that one potentially significant area of innovation in HCI research is the downward and leftward movement from philosophy and critical theory through interaction design theory and into professional practice through frameworks and heuristics. I do not mean to suggest that this is the only or even preeminent mechanism for this innovation to happen; but it does represent an alternative to technology driven innovation, and insofar as it does that, it creates a human-centered counterbalance to a technologically driven HCI agenda. In that dialogue–between technological and philosophical innovation–HCI is surely positioned to do its best work.

I want to return to the beginning of this post. The question was what are the species of criticism, insofar as criticism is a part of interaction design. As I have tried to show, it is incredibly diverse. To think of “criticism” as “magazine software reviews” or even “studio crit” is overly limiting. Criticism informs the full range of our work, as academics, as professionals, as everyday users. The following is the complete picture. I must reduce it on this screen to make it fit, but if you click it, you should be able to see the full-resolution version.

Criticism and interaction design: The field of possibilities. Click to enlarge.