Now it is time to touch on a subject which can get people flustered: the prestige and use of objective and subjective reasoning. So here we go, and some may troll, but that’s part of the fun and reasoning behind this writing.

Objective Reasoning

This type of thinking has been much enjoyed in the natural and “hard” sciences, as they need to use pure facts and evidence gained from means where the studier doesn’t alter the environment and doesn’t allow himself to get into the data as well. The type of writing style also reflects this, as it is being used in passive voice (and I also used an example of this in this sentence, too). This helps to create an objective inquiry into whatever one is studying. One can also think of this type of reasoning is an expression of something that is already out there, to use the terminology of what we have been studying.

This type of thinking can also be reflected in some of the methods we have been exposed to in our methods and foundations classes. We can take a look at Goals, Operators, Methods, Selection rules, as this is an objective way of looking at interactions we see everyday. For example, if we were looking at types of productivity software for workers out there, we can run a scientific test/comparison and see which is more productive at the end of the test. GOMS is one type of method to help get us there, but there are so many more. Something like this will also help us to see the tedium involved in people’s lives, and the tedium involved in carrying out this method. We can also be objective about people’s subjective thinking – an example of this is when we ask users how satisfied they are using or doing something. We can compute numbers based off this thinking, which is a type of objective analysis.

Subjective Reasoning

When we decided to tread ground into this topic, we ended up getting knocked off our rockers for a little bit, as we were asked what the difference between an opinion and a judgment are (what do you think?). As a class, here is sort of the consensus we ended up making: an opinion is just a personal preference one may have, whereas a judgment is crafted from one’s training in a system in knowledge (this training could result from an experiences and practice in a field), which is critical, and can be grounded in objective reasoning.

Subjectivity and its reasoning looks at complex phenomena, whereas the natural sciences try to make everything a smaller version of the problem (like one of our profs say, reductive). This type of reasoning is augmented by our educated experience that we have (just like in our class’s consensus), which can help us to shine new light(s) on a complex phenomenon. The nature of these problems and types of thinking rely upon us, which are shaped by our own history (and history of the phenomenon) and personal preferences. Not every single person has the exact same preferences and history, which is what helps to make these problems unique and complex. These can be used to help give us clarity and insights, just like PRInCiPleS do.

Help From Some Experts

And then we take a look into some critical critiques of experiences from Buxton and also Bertelsen. We went into the juicy world of Buxton’s mixers. There was no ethnography or objective studies done on his part to craft his critique of different juicers. An important part of this paper was that we got to learn about Buxton and his views, which helped to shape his critique, and critique over time (multiple houses, wife, etc.). One of the important reasons why he liked the juicer he liked the best was due to the design – it allowed him to not exert as much pressure at the end, while enjoying a cadence of the gears (music to the thirsty ears in the morning).

Buxton did include some objective thinking to help form his critique, though. He took a look at each of the objects and their designs, and related the designs to the experience. Some juicers made noise, and others were just hard to pull. This was a conclusion at taking a look objectively at each juicer – this something each of us has the ability to do, and not necessarily on juicers. Buxton interweaves his subjective thinking with his objective notes about the design and his life to be able to give a high-level critique of what’s going on for him. There were no comments akin to “it’s stupid” or “i just like it”, but rather his feelings which were grounded in the design. We need to be able to articulate these feelings and notes about the designs we deal with, not only as designers, but to other designers to help us note intricate details related to a crafted experience. This can lead us to a potential judgment of a design on our behalf. Can you bring your whole self and knowledge to a problem – the world may never know (that’s a Tootsie Roll reference there).

Beterlsen takes a much more objective approach with a garnish of subjective elements to discussing aesthetics and experiences of people using Word. There is a technical hodgepodge of vocabulary:

***hegemony (power of a majority to force minority to do something their way) – In this paper, office values are foisted onto the user against their will

***genre (type or kind – there are genres of books, movies, but there are also types of interfaces and interactions, which we have begun to study already) – In this paper, what type of genre is Word?

***remediation (the act of correcting faults or deficiencies) – How is remediation used in this paper?

***deconstruction (the close reading of texts (maybe in our case, programs/interactions/interfaces?) to show that instead of a whole entity and given text has contradictory meanings (wikipedia) – How is this concept talked about by Bertelsen?

***readerly vs writely texts (a term given to denote the amount of interpretations for a reader to give to a text. Writerly texts have multiple meanings and force a reader to be able to become an author to truly process and understand a text. Readerly texts are texts where it is geared towards the reader, where the reader doesn’t have to utilize this much effort to understand and process a text) – How is this utilized in Bertelsen?

We can be a critic!

So one could say a mountain (or big rocks) to get out of this set of readings is that we are trying to expand and grow our own critical eyes when we look at interactions and interfaces and whatnot out there. We have at our disposal many different pieces of a “bag of tricks”:

***We have a vocabulary:
Keep your technical vocabulary up to snuff, as we can use these as part of our conceptual repertoire. Don’t also forget to include the concepts you are basing “stuff” off of. That’s important, too.

***Taking the vocabulary further:
Now that we are beginning to get our vocabulary and use that as a basis to filter that through our own experiences and subjectivity. This will help us to create new connections and associations with ourselves which we never thought were possible. Then we can continue and make more associations and try to figure out more about the world and our world as well. The connections will fire everywhere – it’s bound to happen. But if you already know some of this stuff, dive deeper, as these are tools to help us dig deeper and find new details. Doing this for stuff we already know is just going through the motions, and we want to be better designers than that.

The Cultivate Counter

We have an update on this class side note, the number of times the word (or any of its variants) cultivate has been said is now increased to 9.