Excerpt: Toward a Critical Practice in Design

A critical practice challenges prevailing values through works based in some other set of values. This is a form of conscientiousness. In a world where technique has too often become an end in itself, a culturally critical attitude has become essential to meaningful design. How to seek and identify a problem is as important as how to solve a problem.

The graphical user interface originally arose from this kind of questioning outlook. Now physical computing arises from questioning the assumptions by which the graphical interface became overblown. Projects in research institutes and schools often provide the best examples of this inquiry. Graduate students combine microelectronics with storyboards to demonstrate alternative formats of interactivity. For example, the first crop of projects from the new Interactivity Institute at Ivrea, Italy, in 2002 explored the emotional significance of smart objects based on interfaces other than screens and buttons.

Critical practice in interaction design works with a more openended and provocative story than problem solving in device engineering has typically done. This emphasis on design as communication elevates our intentions about narrative structure, and leads directly toward assertions of a liberal art.

A focus on premise has benefits in the practical work of building business applications. As John Carroll has observed, "The worst misstep one can make in design is to solve the wrong problem." Mere technical possibility is seldom sufficient in this regard. Rather, it is strategic insight that drives design. Problem seeking complements problem solving. Because problems are seldom determinate in any case, this seeking tends to involve selective attention to the more telling aspects of a situation. Designs become distinguished by which considerations have been given attention, among an excess of possibilities. Ethics may enter the decision making. Fostering a culture around design involves value judgments about what we want to build.

Typically, a design premise interprets a context. Good design helps us make sense of contexts. The artifacts of design help us evoke understandings of contexts. Critical design produces artifacts that concretize and catalyze. Because cultural factors shape whether a design proposition raises questions of value, culturally situated propositions tend to yield more meaningful designs. A thing may be memorable more for when, where, or how it was acquired than for its intrinsic form. A service may be significant primarily in relationship to other services in time or place. The success of a design is arrived at socially.

Crudely, this suggests that market acceptance is the only criterion necessary. More to the point of critical practice, it suggests how design must help people understand a situation in a different way. The Walkman was a huge success because it made people rethink the context of listening to recorded music. Picture telephony has been unsuccessful for decades because people are unwilling to present themselves visually without advance notice. The amount of technology that has been adopted into everyday life demonstrates the significance of design as a successful liberal art. The very character of life and society has been transformed by planned artifice.

Appreciation and learned criticism must contribute to this socialization and build a culture around interactive technology. Often these processes involve the maturation of genres. Much of the significance of productions tends to emerge relative to other productions. This is certainly true for individual designers, firms, and schools, whose authority rests largely in accumulated bodies of past work. It is also true for culture-wide bodies of work, however. Without going into the anthropology of expressive preferences or the reasons for the existence of genres, it is safe to say that cultures do become identified with particular themes. The Germans and French both bend metal, and both cook, but the one culture particularly excels at the former and the other at the latter.

Within genres, formal types emerge. In blues (a musical genre) the twelve-bar blues (a formal type) continues to yield more interesting new variants than switching to, say, eleven- or fourteen-bar blues. The everchanging relationship between established forms and expressive content has long been at the center of aesthetic theory and appreciation.

Critical and cultural narratives remain essential to significant design, then. Good design is felt to be communicative. Arguments for design as a liberal art assert that it is principally a communication discipline. Arguments for the importance of artifacts assert that much of this communication is tacit. Cultural expression uses genres and their formal types as a means, not an end. Content is participatory; it is something you do, or perceive, and not simply information you receive.

When the objects of artifice pervade our lives, cultural narrative and memory depend on widening the appreciation of design. The true test of a medium is its capacity to support cultural expression. Beyond usability and identity, we seek appreciation. Unless the kinds of deliberation generalized here can be built up around the interactive technology productions that increasingly occupy our efforts, those efforts are likely to result in cultural noise. By limiting design consideration to that which is numerically predictable or visually fashionable, we produce a lot of junk. By expanding the design of context-based information technology to reflect appreciation, experience, usability, and desire, more of us can contribute to the cultural assimilation of so much technical production.

We do not seem to mind being surrounded with books or buildings because those have been through much more such cultural deliberation. Depending on choices we now face in design practices, interactive systems could similarly assume cultural meaning. In any case, they seem destined to surround us.

Malcolm MCullough

An extract from MCullough's book "Digital Ground: Architecture, Pervasive Computing, and Environmental Knowing", April 2004, MIT Press, £24.95

Associated Link: More from the book (from McCullough's personal site)

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