This talk will discuss how to understand the role of critique in relation to the increasing proliferation of interfaces across everyday life from apps to sensors. While theorizations of interface critique can be readily be found in HCI proposals such as reflexive design or humanistic HCI, or broadly within the interdisciplinary field of media art, these cases are not always considered within broader ecologies of practice or ‘critical technical cultures’ from industry practitioners to vernacular subcultures that also grapple with the asymmetries and exploitative aspects of interaction design.

Drawing from software studies and media theoretical accounts of the interface as a techno-fluid milieu, I offer a navigational matrix to contextualize modes of interface critique at large, namely specifying traps and enclosures, surfacing asymmetries and augmenting alternatives. I argue that these orientations provide an invitation to develop new metacritical theories and common capacities, particularly through the possibilities of grappling with systems of domination otherwise built to prefigure our experiences of them.

Michael Dieter will be in Siegen.

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