Design activity #7: analysis and critique
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. Beginning next week, on April 14, we will have three class sessions
devoted to different forms of “crit”: on April 14, a more structured peer review session focused
around issues that each of you identify; on April 21, a session oriented toward “the audience,”
where students from last year’s class will provide feedback, and on April 28, a session oriented
toward “the critic,” where outside experts from a few different disciplines will review your
designs.
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.
When you present your work to others, 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 audience wellness goals, 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 more esoteric practices like egg cleansing) would hold true given
a different rhetorical strategy (for example, emphasizing how a broader understanding of
alternative medicine systems could be of particular interest in people who are getting older and
are more likely to be susceptible to chronic conditions that aren’t served well by Western
practice). 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.
As noted above, we will have three critique sessions in the upcoming weeks:
 With peers (other authors) on April 14.
 With students from last year’s class (acting as audience members) on April 21.
 With experts from different disciplines (acting as critics) on April 28.
Each person will have between 20 and 25 minutes to present their work and solicit feedback from
the assembled group. You can determine for yourselves how to structure your time; however,
remember that your goal is to get into a deep conversation about your project and not to present a
monologue about your project. Note that you do not need to present everything that you have
done regarding your project; your time will likely be more productive if you focus on just a few
decisions.
See if you can creatively draw upon the strategies described in the Tohidi, et al article to devise a
critique plan that will elicit reflective commentary from your assessors. You don’t have to ask the
assessors to sketch something; you could ask assessors to write the first three things that come to
their minds when you say “toxicity,” or ask them to compare two different versions of a
collection and then create their own version, or ask them to guess what your project’s position on
alternative medicine is, or anything you can dream up that will generate a useful dialogue
between you and the people reviewing your work, where you receive productive suggestions for
improvement that help you evolve your thinking about your design.