This panel will explore whether Critical Design offers new insight as a method for articulating future interactions. Will its promise deliver or are Interaction Designers destined to experience the same feeling of disappointment that HCI practitioners felt after the novelty of Ethnography began to fade? Will the design fictions of Critical Design mature into design facts or will the demand to solve problems short circuit the method? Indeed, is problem solving per se an out-moded way of design thinking in the context of today’s multi-layered hybrid society?

1. Critical Design :: Is it just
designers doing ethnography
or does it offer something
more for Interaction Design?
Michael Smyth
Chris Speed
Martin Brynskov

2. Requirements generation has a
strong tradition within HCI

3. A rational, engineering focussed
approach to problem solving and
refinement

4. Interaction Design takes a more
‘designerly’ approach and
considers both the problem and
solution in a more fluid and
intertwined manner

5. One method favoured by Interaction
Designers is ethnography
Observation that that aims to
provide insight into work,
culture and behavioural
practices

6. What happens when we need to
extend the horizon to identify
emergent themes?
What do you do when there is
nothing to observe?

7. Design as a catalyst or
provocation for thought

8. Viewing the world through different eyes
thereby questioning preconceptions

9. Archigram’s Walking City

10. Superstudio

11. Critical Design acts as a catalyst or
provocation for thought (Anthony
Dunne, 1999)

12. Critical Design attempts to
challenge our assumptions and
preconceptions about the role that
products and services play in
everyday life

13. NonObject, Branko Lukic
Rawphisticated cell phone - a
deliberately unfinished finish makes
us question our desire for
perfection in our lives and objects

14. Tarati Touchless - Removal of the
physical barrier, letting us reach out
and touch someone

15. CUn5 Superpractical Cell Phone -
pure functionality taken to a higher
level

16. How do we extend the requirements
horizon beyond existing systems in
order to identify emerging themes
within a field?
How do we begin to design concepts when
we don’t know what the design space will
look like, let alone who the user
population will be?

17. Preckam Most :: Crossing the Bridge,
Interaction Design Workshop,
Magdalena Festival, Slovenia (2009)

18. An installation that sought to slow
down people’s journeys, to provide a
moment for contemplation or
reflection, or simply an opportunity
to admire a view of the city

19. Crossing the bridge became a
different experience

20. The act of taking photographs
facilitated chance meetings ....

21. .... exchanged glances that made
everyday routines a little more
memorable and special.

22. The Old Bridge was re-appropriated
as a gallery, people who had taken
photographs returned to walk the
bridge and admire the work of their
fellow citizens of Maribor

23. For a few days the experience of the
journey was changed, crossing the
bridge was different, somehow more
joyful

24. Fragments of Place :: The Edinburgh
Festival Fringe (2008)

25. An experimental work to explore the
‘sense of place’ experienced by
people engaged in interaction with a
public installation

26. Images and tags uploaded via MMS
using a short code

29. Interaction Barriers :: motivation &
comprehension

30. Interactive experience is about more
than the push of a button or the
movement of a finger
How do we deal with a situated
experience that increasingly resides
at the boundary space where
physical and conceptual worlds
merge?

31. Michael Smyth
Centre for Interaction Design
Edinburgh Napier University
www.michael-smyth.co.uk