Homework 7
Eric Minick
1) This paper provided a good baseline for thinking about critiquing in other systems. While designing kitchens isn't excactly my thing, I really enjoyed sitting back and applying this concepts to other domains. The examination of older systems while completely needed left me a bit confused at first.
2) The challenges and advances in embeding critiquing systems into software which aids in design.
3) I'm really interested in how one goes about deciding how 'aggressive' the critic should be. Microsoft has a bunch of really bright people but they managed to have really bad and really good critics introduced in the same software, Word. You have an obnoxious, distracting critic like Clippy who is also rarely useful but also the automatic spelling and grammar checks which quietly underline what it thinks might be errors. How a developer finds the balance really interests me.
4) While I'm aware of several other systems that use critiquing of one form or another, I'm not aware of anything else written on the subject.
5) Design: Critics are crucial to design tasks. Most hard problems involve individuals proposing ideas and then those ideas being altered by critics over time. If a computer could take the place of one of these critics, that would be good.
Learning: Critics facilitate learning on demand. Since we are unlikely to know everything about a problem which we need to up-front, we are often required to learn as we go. A helpful critic can bring the appropriate information to us as we need it.
Collaboration: The act of being a critic is a form of collaboration. A computerized critic allows for an individual to have a collaborative experiance.
Media Support: I wasn't aware of systems built specifically to try out critics. The systems discussed in the paper show a lot of promise.
6) My instict for where this research could do the most good would be to build a system or use an existing system and carefully study how users interact with it. It seems to me that one of the great difficulties is providing useful information without interrupting. While this is somewhat addressed in the paper, I would be interested in digging further into it.
          
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