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
INF 385 U, Digital Media Collections
Spring 2010
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 Collections
Spring 2010