In my presentation based on recent theoretical work, I offer a navigational matrix for interface critique based on three orientations: identifying traps and enclosures, surfacing asymmetries and augmenting alternatives. Aiming to bridge a range of practices and conceptual contributions from HCI, media art, vernacular critique and practitioner-based design, this framework nevertheless is elaborated mainly in terms of experiments with the specific design-abilities of apps, social media platform infrastructures and the web.

This workshop invites participants to consider how this conceptual matrix, along with related work in the interdisciplinary field of interface critique, can be extended and refined through exploration of other forms of interface relation, including, for example, idioms of voice interfaces, capture of gestures, conversational design of chatbots, immersion of virtual and augmented reality consumer devices, and onto-epistemologies of environmental sensors, among others. What are the changing stakes for testing user-experience design as it proliferates into settings of urban design, healthcare, automobiles, money or the cognitive assemblages of machine-learning systems? How have forms of criticism and critique been elaborated in such contexts? What (extra)disciplinary forms of expertise are mobilized, and what kinds of collective critical knowledge, concepts and methods might be established in support of new common literacies, technologies and infrastructures?

Michael Dieter will be in Siegen

Register here*

*As the workshop is an internal event, external guests please contact Dr. Johannes Schick by email for registration, indicating their academic title, full name, their institution, their official email address and the title of the event they wish to attend.