CRITICAL DESIGN CPSC 544 Julia Bullard November 28, 2017 JULIA BULLARD 2 Assistant Professor at the iSchool Knowledge organization systems, values-in- design, critical theory DEFINITIONS
“Critical design is a form of research aimed at leveraging designs to make consumers more critical about their everyday lives, and in particular how their lives are mediated by assumptions, values, ideologies, and behavioral norms inscribed in designs.” (Bardzell & Bardzell, 2013) Dunne and Raby contrast this against “Affirmative Design”
3 AFFIRMATIVE DESIGN
“the emphasis is on easy pleasure and conformist values. This genre reinforces the status quo rather than challenging it. We are surrounded by products that give us an illusion of choice and encourage passivity.” (Dunne & Raby, 2001, p.58, 45) Promotes “conformity, obedience, easy pleasure, and corporate identity” (Bardzell & Bardzell, 2013, p. 3298)
4 DUNNE AND RABY’S BINARY
Affirmative Design Critical Design
Primary intended Primary intended outcome is a better outcome is knowledge product or service and discussion Reinforces how things Provides a critique of are now and conforms the prevailing to expectations situation through designs that embody alternative values
5 CRITICAL DESIGN: KEY IDEAS
Design is political Design can be a mode of inquiry Design can spark debate, change perspectives
6 CRITICAL DESIGN
Engages with HCI’s potential to: marginalize isolate threaten survival
7 CRITICAL DESIGN PROCESS
Theorize Design
Critique Prototype
8 THE “CRITIQUE” IN CRITICAL DESIGN
Twists or comments on traditional design Similar to participatory design, the user is an active maker of meaning Intent to be dialogic: the product provokes discussion and the users’ reaction informs theory
9 EXAMPLES OF CRITICAL DESIGN 10 Teddy bear blood bag radio Always somewhere, never there Photobox
TEDDY BEAR BLOOD BAG RADIO 11 Dunne, A. & Raby, F. Design for Debate. Convivio Web-Zone 203: http://daisy.cti.gr/webzine/Issues/Issue%203/Art%2 0and%20Design/index.html TEDDY BEAR BLOOD BAG
Precursor: Chew-Chew, the robot that eats only sugar cubes
12 TEDDY BEAR BLOOD BAG
Problem: Technologies facilitating organic matter as fuel for robots open up new types of exploitation.
Critical design challenge: How can we get the public and designers to engage with the consequences of this technology?
13 TEDDY BEAR BLOOD BAG RADIO
14 ALWAYS SOMEWHERE, NEVER THERE 15 Feinberg, M., Carter, D., & Bullard, J. (2014). Always somewhere, never there. In Proceedings of the 32nd annual ACM conference on Human factors in computing systems - CHI ’14 (pp. 1941– 1950). http://doi.org/10.1145/2556288.2557055
ALWAYS SOMEWHERE, NEVER THERE
Problem: Clear and usable classification systems flatten and distort realities.
Critical design challenges: How can a digital information collection foreground the residual? What is the interaction, or reading, experience of such a collection?
16 ALWAYS SOMEWHERE, NEVER THERE
Three designers created classificatory interfaces with an attempt to foreground the residual Solicited interaction critiques from professionals and student readers Synthesized readers’ critiques and designer reflections into a new concept of database navigation
17
18
a .
the the
Texas its browsing browsing
Here in Texas in Here addresses relationship a between stereotypical ofidea Texas as positioned against reality, filtered through an authorial persona’s as perspective non-native resident. Texas Some categories reference that concepts not are in represented the collection’s videos current
STEREOTYPICALITY & REALITY ALWAYS SOMEWHERE, NEVER THERE
Asking participants to critique the designs rather than use or evaluate them lead to rich data, well- formed arguments “In both substance and scope, these arguments challenged our own initial interpretations of our work and propelled our thinking.”
19 ALWAYS SOMEWHERE, NEVER THERE
One participant called the design “a perfectly functioning dilemma generator”
We found that database design typically orients towards a transport mode of interaction, but participants experienced critical designs as a wayfaring mode of interaction
20 ALWAYS SOMEWHERE, NEVER THERE
Our two research questions became commingled: it seemed like a collection might foreground the residual not through being different so much as through being read differently Discovered modes of database design that would reveal and explain residuality via a wayfaring mode of interaction
21 PHOTOBOX
22 Odom, W., Sellen, A., Kirk, D., Banks, R., Regan, T., Selby, M., Forlizzi, J., Zimmerman, J. (2014). Designing for Slowness, Anticipation and Re-Visitation: A Long Term Field Study of the Photobox. In proceedings of SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. Toronto, Canada. CHI ’14. ACM Press.
PHOTOBOX
Problem: Ample storage and the easy creation of content has made personal collections large and largely invisible
Critical design challenge: How can we design for anticipation? How will users react to a device that does not demand their attention? How will users react to a device that they cannot control or predict?
23 PHOTOBOX
24 PHOTOBOX
Prototype deployed in three households for 14 months Interviews every two months and at the end of the deployment Field notes and documentary photography
25 PHOTOBOX
“The surprise of getting a photo was great but I had this, I don’t know, sense that I should have some ability to make it print. …Sometimes I’d have these thoughts like why am I not telling it when to? I guess it’s what I’m used to doing. …When we got back [from vacation]. …I opened it up and found three photos, one was of a different trip, [from] back when we first met. That’s when I felt like I ‘got it.’ It’s going to do its thing. It can take care of itself. That way of thinking about it changed things for me. I don’t have other things that do stuff on their own. From then on, it started to take on a
personality. It’s independent and takes its time, 26 but it’s going to print something for me.” PHOTOBOX
“It made me think about how quickly things are moving these days. Like I check Facebook four or five times a day, clicking through all kinds of stuff. Like what’s all that information doing to my brain?? …I thought about changing things up some. …I took a break from Facebook recently. Don’t know how long it’ll last [laughs] but I thought why not try it out.”
27 PHOTOBOX
Importance of layered randomness Unfamiliar and disruptive machine behaviour Caused frustration but also invited meaning Importance of long-term (14 month) study From novelty to disruption to integration
28 PHOTOBOX
Successful at providing a rich, ongoing sense of engagement with digital photo archives Prompted participants to reflect on the role, place, and pace of other technologies in their lives
29 EVALUATING CRITICAL DESIGN
30 SOME TYPES OF CRITICAL DESIGN
Transgression Satire Staging of dilemmas Provocation
31 Changing Proposals for Enhancing Reflectiveness perspectives change appreciation
Topic
Purpose
Functionality
Interactivity
Form
Materiality
Bardzell, J., Bardzell, S., & Stolterman, E. (2014). Reading Critical Designs: 32 Supporting Reasoned Interpretations of Critical Design. Proceedings of the 32Nd Annual ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 1951–1960. http://doi.org/10.1145/2556288.2557137 RELATED APPROACHES
Speculative design Adversarial design Research through design Constructive design Design fiction
33 DESIGN FICTIONS CFP
We seek submissions that imagine possible futures for research on the relationships between computers and people. Submissions will include two portions: a fictional document related to the conduct of research and an author statement about the document. The fiction document could be an extended abstract, a call for papers, an excerpt from API documentation, a book review, a study protocol for IRB review, or any other relevant type. The author statement should connect that document to current events, cite on-going research in the field, or otherwise extrapolate how the envisioned future might arise from our given present. 34 Call for submissions. (2017) ACM Group 2018. http://group.acm.org/conferences/group18/author.html REFRAMING YOUR LIGHTWEIGHT PROJECT AS CRITICAL DESIGN
35 QUESTIONS TO ASK ABOUT YOUR PROJECT
What assumptions does your project make? About the domain of use About how the technology should serve users About dominant cultural, social, or economic values
How could your design instead: Challenge dominant notions (for example, of comfort, pleasure, capitalism)? Make users think critically about the role of technology in their lives?
36 YOUR ALTERNATE VERSION
Propose an alternative, critical design
Suggestions: Make it refuse to work in expected ways (counterfunctional) Make it a design fiction (propose something imaginative, requiring new capabilities or as a extreme consequence of your design) Make it serve aims against the scope of commercial design
Include ideas on how you could evaluate the effect of the design 37
DISCUSSION
38 THEMES FROM STUDENT REFLECTIONS
Is any advance in design paradigm “critical”? (e.g., human-centered design) Is the goal of HCI only to address human needs? Can or should it not also make users think about their needs? Is the point of critical design only exploratory and imaginative or is it actually something that we can use to solve problems?
39 REFERENCES AND FURTHER READING
Bardzell, S., Bardzell, J., Forlizzi, J., Zimmerman, J., & Antanitis, J. (2012). Critical design and critical theory. In Proceedings of the Designing Interactive Systems Conference on - DIS ’12 (p. 288). New York, New York, USA: ACM Press. http://doi.org/10.1145/2317956.2318001 Bardzell, J., Bardzell, S., & Stolterman, E. (2014). Reading Critical Designs: Supporting Reasoned Interpretations of Critical Design. Proceedings of the 32Nd Annual ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 1951–1960. http://doi.org/10.1145/2556288.2557137 DiSalvo, C. (2012). Adversarial Design. Cambridge: MIT Press. Dunne, A., and Raby, F. (2001). Design Noir: The Secret Life of Electronic Objects. Birkhäuser. Dunne, A., and Raby, F. (2013) Speculative everything: design, fiction, and social dreaming. Cambridge: MIT Press. Feinberg, M., Carter, D., & Bullard, J. (2014). Always somewhere, never there. In Proceedings of the 32nd annual ACM conference on Human factors in computing systems - CHI ’14 (pp. 1941–1950). http://doi.org/10.1145/2556288.2557055 Odom, W. T., Sellen, A. J., Banks, R., Kirk, D. S., Regan, T., Selby, M., … Zimmerman, J. (2014). Designing for slowness, anticipation and re-visitation. Proceedings of the 32nd Annual ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems - CHI ’14, 1961–1970. http://doi.org/10.1145/2556288.2557178 Pierce, J., & Paulos, E. (2014). Counterfunctional things: Exploring possibilities in designing digital limitations. In Proceedings of the 2014 conference on Designing interactive systems - DIS ’14 (pp. 375– 384). New York, New York, USA: ACM Press. http://doi.org/10.1145/2598510.2598522 Pierce, J., Sengers, P., Hirsch, T., Jenkins, T., Gaver, W., & DiSalvo, C. (2015). Expanding and Refining Design and Criticality in HCI. In Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems - CHI ’15 (pp. 2083–2092). New York, New York, USA: ACM Press. http://doi.org/10.1145/2702123.2702438 40 Wakkary, R., Odom, W., Hauser, S., Hertz, G., & Lin, H. (2015). Material Speculation: Actual Artifacts for Critical Inquiry. Aarhus Series on Human Centered Computing, 1(1), 12. http://doi.org/10.7146/aahcc.v1i1.21299