Toward A Theory of Design Critiquing

Critiquing is a fundamental part of design education, yet we lack a clear and systematic understanding of how effective teachers make decisions about how to critique students. Although there is a considerable literature on design education, little has been written about design critiquing, specifically about critiquing strategies.

The dissertation outlines a theoretical framework of design critiquing practice developed through a literature survey. It then describes a computational model based on this framework, implemented in the Furniture Design Critic program, a kind of constraint-based tutor. The Furniture Design Critic provides a basis for describing and articulating critiquing strategies. The program first assesses the conditions of critiquing: how much a designer knows, his or her weaknesses and strengths, what critiquing methods have been effective for the designer, and the history of interaction between critic and designer. Based on this the Furniture Design Critic then selects a set of critiquing methods.

This program offers a computational model to describe design critiquing and to model inference about critiquing, and an environment for exploring and investigating alternative critiquing strategies. The dissertation contributes to an ongoing discussion of critiquing in design, design education, and intelligent tutoring systems