How to be Critical?

How to be Critical?

1. Do you have a Good Design? How to know it's Good?

   • Critique
     • Designers give constructive feedback via Critique
       • Critique: Collaborative deconstructions of what makes a design successful and what makes it fail.
         • Design Critique Unique Features are:
           • Critique are 2 ways
             • Critic in a critique must engage deeply
               • Critiques are both divergent and Convergent
                 • They can generate ideas, or point in new directions. But they can also narrow, revealing why something doesn’t
               • This means that critique is “garbage in, garbage out”: if the person offering critique does not have expertise, their critiques may not be very meaningful.
             • It is not just one person providing critical feedback, but rather the designer articulating the rationale for their decisions and the critic responding to those judgments.
     • Critiques can be negative and abusive
       • Its an attempt to free people to provide deeply honest feedback about design.
         • train designers to have “thick skin,” impervious but open to negative feedback.
           • an be highly discouraging to many novice designers, making them question their abilities.
             • Solution to the above problem?
               • Use of “hamburger” rule or “shit sandwich".
                 • if you’re going to say something sharply negative, say something genuinely positive first, and perhaps something genuinely positive after as well.
                   • Benefits of doing so is:
                     • finding something positive to say about something you don’t like forces you to consider the possibility that there is something actually good about the idea, even though all you might notice is what isn’t working.
                       • This strategy has the added bonus of making people much more likely to listen to your feedback, because they’ll be primed by positive feedback.
     • Example of Critique
       • Main points to notice and understand were:
         • It’s respectful
           • each person listening and accepting what the other person is saying.
           • It’s collaborative
             • each person contributing knowledge to the conversation
             • It’s grounded
               • focusing on why choices are made and why different choices were made, and how that might effect the success of the solution.
     • Socratic Questioning
       • Another form of critique
         • The person giving the critique wants to deeply probe the designer’s way of thinking and dig beneath the surface of their design.
           • To achieve this critique there are some kind of Questions that needs to be answered.
             • Clarification questions, which encourage the designer to clarify their thought process.
               • Questions that challenge the designer’s assumptions .
                 • Questions that encourage the designer to consider alternative perspectives .
                   • Questions that encourage the designer to spell out the implications and consequences of their design.
     • Good Critique
       • isn’t just about the method, but also expertise.
         • expertise in the domain a design is exploring
           • response bias
             • means that it can be essential to have someone that is impartial, or at least perceived to be impartial, to receive the feedback.
       • How does someone judge what makes a design “good”?
         • "good” is a domain-dependent idea.
           • you can’t define good without understanding context of use.
             • there are some design principles that one might use to make more absolute judgements of “good” design.
               • Let's see a few common, vague and practically not useful principles
                 • Intuitive
                   • Someone can infer from the information in design that what the purpose or intent of something is.
                 • User Friendly
                   • Imprecise phase which suggests a lot without meaning a lot
               • There are many design principles in broad use that are a bit more precise, even though they might not be universally good in all contexts
                 • Simple
                   • Novel
                     • Powerful
                       • Invisible
                         • Universal
                           • Just
                             • refers to design justice who's sole purpose is to look and inspect that all designs are not amplifying inequities and injustice to world and if it is then dismantle them.
                           • It is something that all of humanity should be able to access, prizing equality over other values.
                         • Try to provide natural interfaces that don't need to be learned, personalized or calibrated. Eg: Siri & Alexa
                       • values the ability of designs to augment human ability.
                     • Novelty is powerful in that it has the power to surprise and empower in new ways also, It also has the power to convey status
                   • This is a design aesthetic that prizes minimalism and learnability.
   • Empiricism
   • Analysis