Rich Vagueness and Hollow Vagueness
We are trying to figure coherent ways to communicate vague ideas constantly. Our experience is vague but it can lead to sharp insights. How does this happen? Our conscious faculties constantly transla...
The Social Context of Confidence
The perception of clarity, conviction and drive are socially mediated. Socially mediated by the friends we choose to have, either batchmates or seniors. I strongly recommend to my students to keep one...
Self-Evaluation and Teachers
Self-evaluation remains unfamiliar to most people because most of us internalised the "self-critical" metric on the basis of external expectations imposed without revision—without genuinely thinking a...
Seamless Is Not Always Better
What is a seam? A seam is a point where something ends and something else begins. So actually speaking nothing is genuinely "seamless." The word functions like vacuum sealing—promising hermetic isolat...
Jury Criteria and Transparency
Jury evaluation criteria needs to be transparent in its scope, interpretation and application context. While external jury panel members supposedly employ tacit knowledge accumulated across decades of...
The Mystery of Evaluation Criteria
Evaluation presents two perspectives on learners. One sees learners within a process such that they do not even know the extent of the distance they must travel to achieve their outcomes. This perspec...
Teaching Coherence Evaluation
Design education operates through continuous exposure to critique cultures without teaching students to evaluate coherence in their own concepts. This imbalance—privileging external validation whilst ...
Critique That Engages With Reasoning
Design critique has become an exercise in making designers feel bad rather than helping them design better. Don Norman established that "intuitive" describes a relationship, not a property—it matches ...
When Design Critique Resembles Astrology
Astrology is in all likelihood some primordial, impossible to validate, unscientific socio-cultural riffraff that is passed off as some holy insight into how the universe works. But what this text tal...