Design activity #7: analysis and critique

You’re done! Except you’re just beginning.

You do have a momentarily stable, internally consistent, coherent design. While we have been sharing our interim progress with peers, those informal feedback sessions have focused on a specific activity each week, as opposed to the entire design. Now, however, we can take a step back and contemplate the whole: your overall vision and how you have distributed it over the three design documents. From this vantage point, we are better equipped to recognize our good ideas and identify areas where we might take them further, or where perhaps their utility ends.

In a traditional design studio environment, this stage would involve a “crit” session, in which everyone would present their ideas, and a panel of experts would interpret, interrogate, and comment upon the designs. For these individual projects, we will approximate the goals of a crit in small groups of peers. (For the second, group projects, we will conclude the course with a more formal crit session.)

When attempting to analyze and critique your own work, it’s important to be honest about the strengths and weaknesses that you see. One of the marks of a professional designer is to recognize that one’s allegiance is to the project, not to one’s self. This is extremely difficult to manage in practice, because (in conjunction with traditional ideas of authorship, control, and artistry), those who create tend to identify personally with the creation. We feel attacked and defensive when cherished aspects of our work are questioned. While this is normal, and while we may always be subject to such feelings, we will all benefit from attempting to view our work as if someone else created it. Refining our abilities to rationally, systematically, and compassionately understand and critique others’ work can help in approaching our own. You may be fond of that cute little tag line, or that wry video description, but what goals does it serve? Are you making excuses for it because you can’t bear to let it go?

In presenting your work to others, try to:

  • Explain your motivating goals and strategies for achieving them.
  • Lay out your background assumptions (notions of genre conventions for the online collection as an artifact, ideas about audience characteristics and expectations, for example).
  • Articulate your conceptions of success and failure, perhaps expressing them as a continuum of audience actions and reactions.
  • Show how your various design decisions work within this context of goals and strategies, assumptions, and potential outcomes.

In your presentation, provide your own honest assessment of what you’ve done and point out areas where you feel uncertain about your decisions. Try not to focus on justifying or validating your performance (e.g., “overall, I feel like I did a good job because”). Instead, focus on helping your peers to understand your interpretation of the artifact you created, so that they can better identify possibilities for improvement. Your goal in encouraging critique should be to better or differently understand the work you’ve done, in order to facilitate its evolution.

In providing feedback on others’ work, first try to understand the design on its own terms, based on its creators’ goals, assumptions, and determination of potential outcomes, and see how it works on that level. (Try to avoid that temptation we all have to think about how we would have done it, and to be irritated at those decisions that don’t match our personal preferences.) If you don’t understand why a particular decision was made, or how it fits into the stated goals and strategies, ask. These kinds of questions can actually be the best sort of feedback, because they can make the creator think about some element that he or she might not have actually considered systematically before.

If you think that something works well, or that something could work better, don’t just say that you like it or that X choice isn’t what you would have done. Explain why the decision works in terms of the articulated goals, or explore what might have served the goals better. For example, you might say “I like the way your featured video encapsulates both the type of content and the overall tone that you were aiming for. The browsing categories don’t seem to be as directly related to your goals, though. Did you consider categories based on projects, as opposed to topics? How might that complement what you already have?”

In this situation, it is also appropriate to question more fundamental strategies and assumptions. You might ask, for example, whether an assumption that a certain audience might not be interested in some types of content (whether, say, middle-class retired people wouldn’t be likely to see the value in videos about living in ecovillages) would hold true given a different rhetorical strategy (for example, emphasizing how the community-focused lifestyle of an ecovillage values the contributions of all residents, regardless of age). Could such an alternate perspective productively enhance the design? Differences of opinions between assessors, by the way, can provide interesting avenues for discussion. If the whole group—multiple assessors, the initial creator—can get involved in an extended discussion where multiple interpretations of the work are examined, then the creator will have the benefit of a wide variety of reasoned, informed opinions to work with. And our goal for this activity, in the end, is really to understand both the work’s current state and its potential in more depth.

INF 385 U, Digital Media CollectionsSpring 2010