Skip links

Designing for Quality Critical Discourse

Yesterday I submitted my final paper for my Interaction Culture class. About five minutes later I came up with a better title, but oh well. I thought it would be great to share and get some feedback from people outside of the class.

Title: Designing for Quality Critical Discourse

Abstract: Critique is important in many fields, including art and interaction design. In this paper I will look at two sources that allow for photography critique; Deviant Art and Flickr. I argue that specifics of Deviant Art allow for and foster quality critical discourse. I argue that certain formal characteristics along with use qualities create a particular style. This style is then affected and made sense of through social structures such as photography culture. This style fosters better quality critiques, even though it has weaknesses. I end by presenting six principles for designing for quality critique.

Full Paper: Hill, John Wayne. 2010. Designing for Quality Critical Discourse. http://goo.gl/oZ94O

Overall, I’m very happy with my paper. While I don’t generally enjoy writing, I did enjoy the emergent thought and sheer usefulness of the pre-writing activities that Jeff Bardzell taught us. I think I most enjoyed laying out an argument and using theories that I had never before touched. This allowed me to be confident in what I was thinking and arguing. What scared me the most was the while writing I ended up defining Interaction Style, and was not confident at all in doing so. In an upcoming post, I will devote some time to this definition. Overall, this paper has greatly affected how I view critique interfaces, and has had a huge impact on my capstone. I hope others will share their papers as well!

Leave a comment