After reading all the solutions turned in till this time I came to the conclusion that most of us got the main message of the article right. According to me too, the main message of the article is the explain the need and benefits of embedding critics in design domains. This is so because critics assist designers in problem framing as well as understanding the problem better. Since understanding the problem better and defining the goals well are the key issues in designing critics play an important role in design and learning. This point was identified my most of us.

Most of the answers reflected that the general forms of critiquing that the students were aware of were editors and passive critics used in software development (compilers, LISP critic and its kinds). Most of the questions raised regarding these critics were also similar in nature in the sense that most of us wanted to know as to what extent is critiquing well taken by the designer. In other words how "aggressive" should the critics be and how often should they be triggered. Passive Vs active forms of critiquing was also an important issue raised. It was also identified that these critics (editors especially) could get irritating at times, and tend to bother the users too much. This led to the concepts of user modifiability and varying degrees at which critiquing should be enabled.

Other interesting questions that were raised were "how do we decide if crtiquing is needed at all?" and "If we include critiquing in the design domain does the designer tend to become less attentive since he/she knows that the critic will prompt in case there are some major deviations in the design?".

About the HYDRA system most of the answers suggested that the distinction between the three types of critics (generic, specific and interpretive) was not very clear. Most of us have doubts about specific and interpretive critics and their applications in other domains. The concepts of interpretive critics and their implementation by selecting perspectives were interesting. However I noticed from the answers that there arent many systems with this type of critiquing and that most of the critics we are aware of are generic in nature.


P.S. I hope this is what was expected from my answer.