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Assignment 7: Divya Ashok NOTE: I have read the answers of all the students and commented on what I thought about thier opinions as well as summarized in the end. when I did not have any comments on the answers written by some students, then I have not written about them. Kathryn Byrnes: Katie’s question how teachers can be differentiated into these three kinds of critics (general, specific, and interpretive) is a very interesting question. I am not sure how to put teachers in different categories, I think it would be hard to categorize. But one way is to judge teachers is through some professional exam. I agree with Katie’s understanding of the main message of the article. She wrote how the human critiquing paradigm can be utilized by computer design programs to facilitate the information gathering, decision-making processes of humans. I would also add, critiquing by, humans or integrated design environments, during designing phase is a very important process for a successful design of a product or system. The spelling corrector as a critiquing system is helpful but can not be totally relied on and the automatic spelling correction does not aid in learning. As Katie puts it “when the mistakes are "automatically" corrected the user may not even be aware of the mistake and so will continue to make the same mistake”, I totally agree with this. I agree with Katie’s understanding of the concepts of design, learning, and collaboration in the context of this article. Andrew Lee (Phong) I agree with his understanding of the main message of the article. According to him not so interesting part of the article was the discussion of generic, specific and interpretive critics. I would say without these discussions it would be hard to understand how the three critics work since there are differences in the way they trigger messages, I think the discussion was important. Probably it needed some effort while reading. Ryan Coyer and Aaron Schram: They wrote regarding the software critic system “If it were to get to the point where it was annoying, especially to an expert, it could hinder work performance as opposed to helping it”. I totally agree with this, but what if we give enable/disable option to the users of this system? That way a novice can enable this critiquing facility and an expert can disable. But if the expert is unsure then he/she can enable and check if their design is going in the right direction or not. More writing on analyses of “spelling correctors” as to whether it is a good critiquing system would have been nice. The example just fits the context and does not give much explanation. Their idea of extending the critiquing mechanism into the field of common operating systems is a good one. Alwa and Velezmor They brought up a interesting point “The most interesting part of article is that nowadays computers are also able to criticize our work and help us reflect it, sometimes leading to modification of it, which could help the design process a lot, because one gets to hear different approaches to solving a certain problem.” One that caught my eyes was “computers are also able to criticize our work” this reminded me of Bill Joy’s article Why the future doesn't need us. Henry Doan: His comment about how spelling correctors are very generic is true. He wrote “If spelling correctors were specific or interpretive, they would know you were writing a paper about WWII and that the names of the generals and cities should be left unannounced.” To summarize, all the students had the same opinion about the main message of the article that is critiquing during the design phase of a product is a crucial element for the final product to be of a certain standard and flawless. Most of them agreed that spelling corrector is a good critiquing tool but it is a generic system and it would be more helpful if it were to be specific and interpretive critics too. Most of them agreed that design is an evolving process and needs more then one perspective to build a well designed product and the interpretive critic provides this facility. Most of them agreed that using these software critic systems (which are collaborative in nature) would help designers in learning new aspects of designs. A few of the students thought that certain parts of the paper was hard to understand because it was abstract, like describing the three critiquing systems before giving the examples and so on. Students also wanted to know whether these systems are being used in real world and how are they implemented. Some of them even suggested that the World Wide Web should be used as a collaboration medium to implement these critiquing systems, if done so it would prove to be very powerful.
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