Fun question from : how to evaluate unusual new design ideas, like the very interesting tangible.media.mit.edu/project/disapp?
There are whole fields about this, of course, e.g. in social criticism (Postman, Illich, Deleuze, etc) and in HCI itself, but just unpacking my intuitions:
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Broadly, I see design as the practice of creating artifacts (abstract or physical) which carve the seams of the universe into useful or meaningful shapes, relative to some environment/situation.
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For instance: numerals reify properties of number theory (seams of universe) into symbols (abstract artifact) suitable for scratching on accounting tablets (environment/situation).
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Taken this way, I look at new design ideas in terms of those elements. How does the work characterized the environment/situation? In that env/situation, what are the effects of the proposed artifact? What underlying ideas about reality does the design reflect, and how?
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You can drop each of the triad. Looking at the artifact—completely ignoring the proposed env/situation—what's the full range of implications? Looking at the underlying ideas, what other artifacts might reflect them? Looking at the env/situation, what other seams might relate?
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In practice of course I use lots of different lenses, but these first-principles-y views seem to drive a lot of my instincts, explicitly or implicitly.
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This'll be helplessly abstract, but: the artifact and the env/situation harmonize, resonate. You might see this in fitness to a particular purpose, or in the way that it changes behavior, or in people's emotional experiences, or in the way they think.
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