Critical Engineering: User Experience

“3. The Critical Engineer deconstructs and incites suspicion of rich user experiences.”

I’ve always been fascinated with fabrications of reality. As a kid, I attended the odd magic show now and then. While the act of cutting a person in half is certainly striking, I only began to appreciate the idea of magic once I had an inkling of how it was done.

In the realm of user experience, the goal more often than not is to create something immersive and seamless. A virtual field full of blooming flowers is made up of a digital sea of text. The critical engineer is like the magician, able to envision and create false realities through countless hours of unseen toil. When an audience member begins to question the illusion, they have become a critical engineer.

Penn and Teller do a good job of demonstrating this concept, in that they explain the basic magic trick, but then take it in a different direction that invites one to question their true methods.

(Fair Warning: Going past the 3:00 minute mark is not for the faint of heart.)