We Need Critique More Than Criticism To Help Us Think About AI
Reflections on critique, criticism, and how we should engage in discussion about AI
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As I started my PhD at Caltech, I learned pretty quickly that it would not be wise to bet on my raw intellectual horsepower to set me apart. I still remember some of the moments when the size of the pond and the corresponding size of my fish became apparent.
In those early days, I would head down to the south side of campus for my math class, ACM 100a: Introductory Methods of Applied Mathematics for the Physical Sciences. It was a big lecture hall with a set of nine motorized chalkboards in three columns at the front. Those mathematicians and their blackboards. I sat down, surrounded by a mix of new grad students and junior and senior undergrads. It was quite a feeling to come in as a grad student and see the Caltech undergrads several years your junior doing laps around you. I was just doing my best to keep up.
That class confirmed that it would be a far wiser strategy to reflect on the array of my interests and skills and look for ways they might combine with each other in unique ways. Better to try and find the synergy and build a personal niche rather than try to compete on a single axis. Common skills uncommonly together, it turns out, are very valuable.
Off to Design School
As I considered how to add new dimensions, I noticed that there was an opportunity to double down on building better communication skills. No, unfortunately, it wasn’t in that moment that I decided to start blogging—it would take me almost a decade longer to figure that one out. This juncture was about getting a bit of training in graphic design.
After asking around, I discovered that Caltech had a relationship with Art Center College of Design, located conveniently just across town on the west side of Pasadena. Art Center students could enroll in Humanities and Science courses at Caltech to fulfill their requirements, and Techers could take art and design classes at Art Center through the ArtCenter Extension program. I’m glad to see that the program still exists. After exchanging a few emails with an admissions counselor at Art Center to find the right course to learn some color theory and get a bit more insight into design and layout for designing figures for my slides and papers, I signed up for Intro to Graphic Design.
I had so much fun. Once a week, I would head over to Art Center in my trusty 2002 Chevy Tracker (RIP), climb up the staircase (filled with cool art on the walls), and pop into a big design studio with a bunch of counter-height tables and stools littered around the room.
I remember sitting in the first class session feeling about as out of place as I did in my ACM 100a class at Caltech. What business did an engineering PhD student have in an Art Center class? But there I was. The instructors for the course were two gentlemen, as best I can remember, one ran his own design firm and the other worked for Disney Imagineering. I haven’t connected with them since that class, but I will try to send this post to them as a small token of my appreciation for the way they shaped my thinking.
Experiencing the Crit
All of this is a long-winded way of getting to the point of this post, which is centered on an experience that I learned in that class that has stuck with me ever since. You have to understand: the way a studio art class runs was different than any other classroom I’d experienced. I’d completed plenty of problem sets, written countless lab reports, and built and presented plenty of projects, but never had I experienced one of the central pedagogical elements of an art and design school: the crit.
At the beginning of class, instead of submitting my work in a pile at the front of the classroom like I was used to doing, in this class, the work went on the wall. Every student would use small magnets to stick what they had done for that week up on the magnetic whiteboards that lined the walls of the room, and then we would move together as a class around the room, stopping to discuss each person’s work.
There were several elements that stood out to me from this experience. The first was that the crit engaged the entire class in an evaluative mode. In many classroom settings, there is only one person who gives feedback: the instructor. The crit operated under no such delusions. In the crit, everyone had a voice and was encouraged—required even—to have a take and express their perspective. To be sure, the instructors would offer their feedback (including points where they disagreed with what others had shared), but they only did so after hearing from the rest of the class.
This worked especially well because each person in the room knew their time would come. Not only did this create a sense of shared community and offer a natural incentive to offer constructive feedback, but it also guaranteed a certain level of engagement. Each person’s attempt at the assignment offered not just a hypothetical take, but an actual embodied one. They came into the crit having already taken a shot at the same assignment themselves. It’s easy to suggest a way of doing it differently, but it’s another to actually try.
Together, these elements meant that the crit was an almost uniquely well-designed environment for offering substantive (and often critical) feedback on the work of another, while still realizing that we all share the same goal of helping to reach a particular goal.
We Need Critique for Thinking About AI
I was reminded again of these experiences at Art Center this week when a friend (thanks, James!) shared an essay on the idea of critique with me, a chapter titled “On Critique” from Ann Pendleton-Jullian and John Seely Brown’s book Design Unbound. The chapter on critique is a single essay within a set of essays designed to help us think more clearly about how we might navigate complex challenges. In a few short pages, this essay on critique helped to articulate why my experience of the crit was so formative and remind me of why I want to find more ways to bring this kind of environment into my context as an engineering educator.
They begin the chapter by framing critique as an interactive process. Critique happens within and among a community of practice, not simply by a set of experts or professional critics. A key aspect of critique is that it is designed to generate forward movement. It is an enterprise pursued in community toward a shared goal.
Critique, as practiced in the design studio, is different from criticism or evaluation in that it is a working on, together, not a disinterested evaluation of one person by another. And while involving assessment, it goes beyond assessment of into the realm of how to think about. Therefore, it moves the process forward through speculation as well as analysis.
This idea of “moving a process forward” is a key distinguishing characteristic and one that we are in desperate need of right now in the conversations we’re having about AI and the various ways that it is impacting our life and work. It is easy to criticize. It’s much harder to critique.
As I am working on developing a set of practices and norms for the new lab for imaginative prototyping with AI at Harvey Mudd, the idea of critique will be a central pillar of the way that we operate. Much of my imagination around the kind of culture I want to create is motivated by my experience in the studio at Art Center. It was a glimpse of the way that working together can enable you to learn more effectively.
I’ll close here with a few more quotes that highlight how and why critique is so powerful. Critique normalizes failure and creates an environment where one can have the freedom to suspend disbelief with the understanding that we need a grounding to keep making forward progress.
Critique makes the studio a place in which recursive failure is the norm. One is allowed to fail, expected to fail, over and over again, and in the company of others. Progress is made through work produced and critique in which there is never one right answer.
Forward movement in design requires the suspension of disbelief. One cannot be critically assessing every movement made; overanalysis leads to momentary or permanent paralysis. Critique is intended to scaffold forward movement, and as such, the speculative component of it must allow for inconsistencies and incomplete thought.
With all this in mind, I’ll end by inviting you to join the conversation. Please join and critique.
Got a thought? Leave a comment below.
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Great piece from
on the importance of interest.Finally, there’s something importantly resilient about interest, too. Meaningful projects aren’t always fun; life certainly isn’t always easy; and the moment in history through which we’re living definitely isn’t calming and relaxing. But maybe it is always, or almost always, possible to find and pursue something that’s truly and enliveningly interesting about the place in life in which you find yourself, and the paths that are open to you to take. “May you live in interesting times” isn’t really an ancient Chinese curse. But we do live in very interesting times; there are things you could do today that would deeply and absorbingly interest you. It might be worth seeing where they lead.
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I love the crit as a model. Part of what makes it work is that everyone in the room has already taken a shot at the same assignment, and everyone wants to get better at the same craft.
I'm not sure that condition holds in most AI conversations. People aren't always trying to reach the same destination. Some want replacement, some want a pause, some want acceleration.
This critique approach is a huge part of my writing experience in my writing community, The Habit. I’ve realized more and more that feedback, even critical, helps me improve my work. If no one points out what’s confusing or poorly done in my writing, my writing won’t connect with readers.