**Interaction Criticism And Aesthetics [Bardzell, J.]

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Taken from: Interaction Criticism And Aesthetics.
BARDZELL, J. (2009) Interaction Criticism And Aesthetics. In Proceedings of the 27th international Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Boston, MA, USA, April 04 – 09, 2009). ACM, New York, pp2357-2366.

“The concepts and vocabulary of aesthetics and critical theory have much to offer HCI, because they emphasize qualities and issues that HCI is obviously concerned with in interaction: experience, symbolic density and cohesion, beauty, enlightenment, social justice, dialogism, identity and the self, form and meaning, taste and judgment, ideological encodings, interpretation/hermeneutics, and signifying structures, among many others.” (p2357)

“The goal of this paper is specifically to offer an introduction, for interaction designers, to aesthetic and critical theory as it applies to interaction.” (p2357)

“Thus, appropriating any one technique, say, deep focus, from the rest of this context would rob it of much of its analytic force, since that technique is associated with and made meaningful by a series of films, a coherent theory of film, and an underlying theory of epistemology and ethics. Yet the reductive approaches of experimental science work best precisely when they can isolate on a single feature, control for it, and conduct a series of tests on it. This is not to suggest that there is no solution to this conflict, but merely to acknowledge that the conflict merits reflective action.” (p2358)

“The difficulty is not a mere matter of implementation. Rather, the philosophical underpinnings of artistic activity and scientific visualization are not obviously compatible.” (p2358)

“One way this tendency materializes is in the abundant frameworks offered in the field, which reduce culture and cultural theory to bullet lists. These guidelines may have a legitimate place in practice, and in many cases, they are presented as such. The problem is only when they are mistaken for a coherent theory and cited as authoritative resources on aesthetics, when they in fact make no such claim. An example of this is [A]’s 8-part framework for enabling designers to evaluate interface aesthetics. This framework is explicitly offered as a practitioner’s guidelines, and it was tested and evaluated with graduate students and, on those terms, deemed successful. Considered philosophically, as a theory, the framework is incoherent, in that it integrates ideas from competing theories without any consideration that they seem to contradict each other.” (p2358)
(A) Bertselsen, O. & Pold, S. Criticism as an approach to interface aesthetics. Proc. of NordiCHI’04, ACM Press (2004), 23-32.

“the pattern is that inasmuch as aesthetics and critical theory appear in HCI, they tend to do so in pragmatic ways to solve particular problems. Harder to find (though by no means absent, e.g., [A]) is systematic, rigorous, expert integration aesthetic/critical traditions and HCI. A major reason for this state of affairs is that many of the people who are bringing aesthetics and critical theory into HCI have backgrounds in the sciences, including psychology, HCI, computer science, and so forth. Though they are serious scholars pursuing their work in earnest, they are not philosophers of art or critical theorists. On the flip side, experts of aesthetics and critical theory, to the extent that they even talk about computer technology at all, tend to do so in the context of new media (examples include [B,C,D,E]. They engage less with interaction design as a discipline, and so their work tends to have little influence in HCI. If culture is incidental to HCI, then this situation, in which aesthetics/critical theory and HCI are not quite on the same page, is acceptable. But if we are to accept that HCI is a major cultural force in its own right, and if we are serious about experience design, then the lack of a pool of philosophically reasonable, coherent theories of interaction aesthetics and interaction criticism is a problem that needs to be addressed.” (pp2358-2359)
(A) Coyne, R. Designing Information Technology in the Postmodern Age: From Method to Metaphor. The MIT Press (1997).
(B) Manovich, L. The Language of New Media. MIT Press (2001).
(C) Bolter, J, & Grusin, R. Remediation. MIT Press (1999).
(D) Landow, G. Hypertext 2.0: The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology. The Johns Hopkins UP (1997).
(E) Hanks, K., Odom, W., Roedl, D. and Blevis, E. Sustainable millennials: Attitudes towards sustainability and the material effects of interactive technologies. Proc. of CHI’08, ACM Press (2008), 333-342.

“Richard Shusterman’s Pragmatist Aesthetics [A] builds on the analytic tradition using the pragmatism of Dewey and Rorty to propose an experience centered
aesthetics.” (p2359)
(A) Shusterman, R. Pragmatist Aesthetics: Living Beauty, Rethinking Art. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers (2000).

“One might contrast such a notion of aesthetics with the understanding of aesthetics implicit in, for example, Nielsen’s heuristics [A], which is based on a notion that the aesthetics of interaction merely inhere in the decorative elements that adorn an interface. Neilsen’s position is rejected in a recent Interactions article [B] as superficial. Yet in the same article, the author offers in its place a notion of aesthetics driven by four qualities, two of which are “utility” and “performance.” These qualities bear a non-trivial resemblance the traditional values of HCI and come across more as commonsense than as a philosophically justifiable framework. Whether this new notion is useful for practitioners is beside the point; it is itself a debatable philosophical position that in aesthetics would be subjected to rigorous scrutiny.” (p2359)
(A) Nielsen, J. Ten usability heuristics. Online: http://www.useit.com/papers/heuristic/heuristic_list.html
(B) Gajendar, U. Experiential aesthetics: A framework for beautiful experience. Interactions xv 5, ACM Press (2008), 6-10.

“Cultural criticism is not primarily about taste, or identifying which are good books or movies and which are bad ones. Instead, criticism is typically aligned with continental philosophy, the main rival of analytic philosophy described earlier under aesthetics. Continental philosophy is situated in the radical skepticism of Nietzsche and continues in the twentieth century through the phenomenology of Heidegger; existentialism and Sartres; poststructuralism, Foucault, and Derrida; several generations of feminism from de Beauvoir to Paglia; and the postmodernism of Lyotard and Baudrillard, among others.” (p2360)

“Taken out of context, critical concepts lose much of their original explanatory power, and when they are attached to otherwise rationalistic approaches, they can be even further diminished, impoverished, and trivialized.” (p2360)

“One of them is a rejection of the notion that art and culture “is all subjective,” which is a counterproductive cop-out. Both aesthetics and critical theory are oriented to development of practices of expert judgment, specifically to make possible judgments about art and culture. To be sure, their notions of judgment—and its evaluation—differ. In analytic aesthetics, judgment is grounded in relentless logical reasoning. In critical theory, judgment is cultivated through the deconstruction of knowledge as it appears in—and produces—culture.” (p2360)

“Yet judgment is still treated with skepticism by many in HCI, who do not understand how it differs from mere opinion. Expert judgment differs from opinion inasmuch as it engages in disciplines of judgment, such as aesthetics and critical theory, that offer the intellectual tools to develop rational arguments about cultural phenomena that are difficult or impossible to measure or evaluate scientifically.” (p2361)

“Cultural theory, in contrast, might be fairly described as embodying complex and insoluble philosophical positions, which entail (ontological) assumptions about the nature of reality, epistemological possibilities and constraints, methodological strategies, and ethical stances all at once.” (p2361)

“These theories are not verifiable or predictive in the same way that a theory about the behavior of molecules is. Rather, they are intellectual tools to support the interpretative and activist activities of the critic.” (p2361)

“Does interaction belong in the list of cultural phenomena, alongside film, novels, operas, and TV, or put another way, is interaction the kind of thing that a cultural studies approach could critique? From the standpoint of cultural criticism, the answer is obviously yes. From the standpoint of HCI, which is oriented toward the design and evaluation of real-world interaction design as opposed to cultural critique for refined judgment or broader social activism, the answer is perhaps more nuanced. Two issues are at stake: one is the comparability of interaction to other cultural forms, and the other is the orientation not towards social activism, but rather towards immediate, concrete, and situated interaction design problems.” (p2361)

“As we interact with interaction designs, we create its sequences, its juxtapositions, its meaning and significance. Imagining interaction design artifacts as separate from users, and vice-versa, is certainly possible, but in HCI, we try to blur the distinction and have done so for a long time. Norman’s [A] framework, which explicates the relationships among the design model, the system image, and the user model is oriented toward harmonizing, not differentiating among, the three. HCI has developed techniques to facilitate this harmonization by elaborating conceptual models of systems, predictive performance models (e.g., GOMS), user mental models, and human cognitive models and conscientiously designing systems to be compatible with all of the above.” (pp2361-2362)
(A) Norman, D. The Design of Everyday Things. Basic Books, New York (1988).

“critical approaches are about exposing and exploring alternative assumptions about the key relationships in our field—the user, the design, interaction, the business or home context, and quality of life now and in the future.” (p2362)

“Combining the past two points, the persuasive/rhetorical artifact argument suggests that an inanimate object—a design— is conditioning everyday, practical living. This claim has obvious ethical implications, which both [A] and [B] explicitly consider. Note that ethics is all but irrelevant if a design is just a tool, because ethical agency is situated squarely in the user. But if designs persuade people, or reshape everyday life, they can in that limited sense be understood to exercise agency and have an ethical dimension.” (p2364)
(A) Fogg, B. J. Persuasive Technology: Using Computers to Change What We Think and Do. Morgan Kaufmann, San Francisco (2003).
(B) Buchanon, R. Declaration by design: Rhetoric, argument, and demonstration in design practice. In Margolin, V. (ed.). Design Discourse: History, Theory, Criticism. (1989).

“To ensure the groundedness and relevance of designerly speculation, we need the union of, not competition of, scientific and critical ways of knowing. Our problem space—humancomputer interaction—is an elusive object of study. We cannot see it directly, even less so during the design conceptualization phases. But empirical science, including all forms of user research, can help us understand the phenomenology of interaction, an argument that the field appears to have increasingly accepted after [A]. In a complementary way, critical approaches help us think deeply about how we as designers, and how users as users, construct knowledge about artifacts and users, which stimulates innovation and helps HCI engage its cultural participation with professionalism and intellectual integrity.” (pp2364-2365)
(A) Winograd, T. and Flores, W. Understanding Computers and Cognition. Addison-Wesley, Norwood, NJ. (1986)

“• Interaction design can develop theory. HCI need not passively accept what has already been developed in critical theory. Interaction design is arguably the dominant cultural medium today, and we can innovate on critical theory, to make it work better for our community’s professional and intellectual needs, from new design frameworks to educational vocabularies for design educators and professional mentors.
• Interaction criticism can expose the consequences of design. Researchers can critique interaction designs with the hope of exposing unintended consequences and enabling the community to design more rationally. Ontological design, as it evolved into sustainable design, is an example in which critical activity contributed to the emergence of an important new domain of HCI research and practice.” (p2365)