Crit Alignment

Everybody is bad at design critique. At least, until you get better. What if we pretended we were better?

This spring I’m teaching a small Interaction Design studio course. I really enjoy this, but one challenge is that students are very, very nice.

Which means they’re not great at critique! And critique is a big part of design school, and how you can get better as a designer. A big part of making your work better is hearing from others about how to make your work better. We need everybody to participate, and use their whole brain to figure out how to make things better.

So: this spring I’ve been assigning roles for the students to play. We started with the roles Paolo Pedercini used in a game design course (See here!), like ‘The mean professor”, “The BFF”, etc.

But my favorite so far, sparked by a suggestion from Nate Clark, is a D&D alignment grid. What does a ‘chaotic neutral’ critique look like? How about a ‘lawful evil’?

I had students roll dice to land on a role. Now the student gets plausible deniability to really critique. (“I’m not saying this - don’t take it personally - but the Chaotic Neutral is saying this!””)

Was it perfect? No. Was it fun? Absolutely.