The critique format industrial complex
Issue #10: on crit formats, feedback culture, and how to start doing the relational work we keep avoiding
I’ve probably spent thousands of hours in my career talking about design critique formats. Brainstorming better formats. Rolling out iterations. Tweaking who should be in the room. Time of day. Pre-reads or no pre-reads. Silent crits. Circle formats. Strict templates. No templates. I have truly seen, talked about, and engaged in every format you could possibly imagine.
I don't think any of those conversations were a waste of time, but my taste for them is weaning lately. Because, I firmly believe we’re attempting to optimize the wrong things, and are slapping solution band-aids on something that is actually made better by work that starts with bettering ourselves.
Critique quality has little to do with the format, and has almost everything to do with whether the people in the room know how to give feedback—and whether we trust each other enough to hear it. In this piece, I’m going to talk about how we've spent years optimizing critique formats while the harder and more important work is that of building feedback skills, practicing self-reflection, and creating the relationships and conditions that allow those skills to thrive.
A critique is a social experience first, and a design exercise second
Your nervous system is probably doing a lot more work than you realize anytime you’re participating in collaborative feedback. This is because collaborative feedback isn't exclusively an intellectual exercise, but it's an embodied one as well.
We all love to boil a design crit down to a simple exchange of ideas, but the reality is that it’s (in a large part) a room full of people navigating uncertainty, identity, ego, expertise, and belonging. In current times, you can layer in the added complexity of doing all of this on Zoom — where we’re expected to be fully present and collaborative while staring at tiny rectangles of people’s faces and asking our nervous systems to interpret every pause, silence, and expression with only a fraction of the information we’d have in person.1
In order to articulate what I mean by our nervous systems doing work, I’ll pose some thoughts and questions that may come up in our minds during a crit:
As a presenter:
Do people understand what I’m trying to solve?
Are they critiquing the work, or are they critiquing me?
Did I make the wrong call?
How do I explain this decision without sounding defensive?
Am I allowed to disagree?
Do I trust myself to know which feedback to act on?
Is this useful feedback, or am I just feeling embarrassed?
Is this a safe time to admit uncertainty?
Will changing my mind make me seem weak in my convictions?
As a participant:
Do I have something valuable to contribute?
If I don’t say anything, will people think I wasn’t paying attention?
Do I need to find a problem?
Am I helping, or am I just sharing my opinion?
Is this actually a design issue, or just not how I would have done it?
Am I asking this because I’m curious, or because I want to prove I know something?
Do I need to offer a solution?
Would I say this if we were sitting next to each other?
Am I just stepping on toes and over-complicating this?
None of these questions are inherently bad, if anything, they’re all very human! The challenge is that when we’re navigating these uncertainties, our instinct and focus can shift from curiosity towards self-protection, often subconsciously or reactively. And, when our nervous systems perceive threat, we don't usually become more curious. Rather, we shift to explanations and justifications…and suddenly, we’re defending something we weren’t even attached to just five minutes ago! That overzealousness, more often, is coming from anxiety and dysregulation rather than arrogance.
So, the problem isn’t that these thoughts exist. The problem begins when these thoughts begin driving the conversation and when we start optimizing for being right (protecting ourselves) instead of being curious about something new.
The part we don’t really teach
We’ve all heard over and over that feedback is a skill that needs to be learned and practiced. But, frankly, I have never in my career had any meaningful conversations about how we actually get that practice in. Usually, there’s a quick comment thread on Slack, in a retro, at an offsite — during some, big reflective moment — where someone posits that “feedback culture” needs to be worked on. It gets a bunch of 👍and ➕ reactions. People talk about it for a bit. And then the conversation fizzles and is replaced by brainstorms about changes to format.
My claim is that the real work here is extremely relational and somatic.
Curiosity and trust (whether you’re a presenter or a participant) are that much more difficult to access when you’re body thinks it’s being threatened. And the research on emotional learning suggests that those threat responses don't disappear simply because someone tells us to "be more open to feedback." They change through repeated experiences that contradict our expectations and teach our brains (and bodies!) that a different outcome is possible.
It’s taken me four therapists to learn that nervous systems don’t change because we understand something intellectually. Which, as a product designer who believes the right framework can solve just about anything, is incredibly frustrating.
The invisible layer between noticing and responding
We can’t separate our feedback skills from self-awareness because every piece of feedback is filtered through our perception before it leaves our mouths. So, we have to analyze our unique perception in order to understand what variables are shaping it — this is “the invisible layer.”
So, the skill that needs nurturing here is learning to notice and analyze our own observations before we offer them to the room.
I recognize that this is where I may lose some of you; because this starts to sound very woo-woo, and, I imagine some of you may be thinking, “how am I supposed to get any work done if I’m spending the time unpacking all of my thoughts?!”
Fair. And — stating the obvious here — I’m not suggesting we turn every design crit into a group therapy session where everyone sits in silence analyzing their feelings.
What I am suggesting is that this is a practice. There’s that saying: Rome wasn’t built in a day, but they were laying bricks every hour.
This is where I invite you to lay just one single brick every time you participate in feedback. This isn’t about suddenly becoming someone who analyzes every single thought that crosses your mind. It’s about building small moments of awareness into the feedback process — at work, at home, wherever feedback happens.
Because, as I mentioned earlier, insight alone isn’t sufficient when it comes to rewriting the patterns our bodies have learned. That happens through repeated experiences that build trust and safety over time. Each time we pause, get curious, and create a little more space between our reaction and our response, we’re laying…another brick!
Here are a few bricks you can start stacking and experimenting with:
🧱 Notice your reaction before your response (body scan!)
Before jumping in, take a second to notice what’s happening internally. Are you curious? Confused? Defensive? Urgent? The goal isn’t to remove the reaction — it’s to create enough space to decide what you want to do with it, or simply recognize it and see if it comes up often for you.
🧱 Separate observation from interpretation
Practice noticing the difference between what you actually observed and the meaning you immediately assigned to it. For example:
Observation: The primary action button is visually similar to the secondary actions.
Interpretation: Users won’t know what to click.
This interpretation might be completely valid! The goal isn’t to remove interpretation from feedback (that would make crit impossible), but is to understand when you’re sharing what you’re seeing versus the conclusion you’ve drawn from it. Creating space between those two things gives the problem more breathing room.
🧱 Ask what you’re optimizing for
Before giving feedback, take a beat to ask what outcome you’re actually trying to create. Are you trying to make the work stronger? Reduce uncertainty? Protect against a past mistake? Demonstrate expertise? Get your team to move faster?
There’s no shame in any of these motivations. The goal is simply to notice them.
🧱 Get curious before getting corrective
When something feels wrong, resist the urge to immediately prescribe a solution. Start with a question.
What constraints or tradeoffs were you working with?
What problem(s) were you prioritizing?
Can you share some options you considered before landing here?
Understanding ≠ agreeing. It means making sure you’re responding to the actual problem.
🧱 Give yourself a limit as a participant
See what it feels like to go into a crit with a self-prescribed limit! Meaning, maybe you only let yourself leave three comments. Or, maybe you’ll only let yourself to raise your hand once and share a singular piece of feedback.
What may happen if you remove the pressure to catch every issue, have every thought, or prove your value in the room through quantity? Maybe you’ll find that the feedback you do offer becomes more intentional. Maybe you’ll notice which observations actually feel worth sharing, versus which ones are simply the first reaction that came to mind.
🧱 Only offer feedback you would say out loud
Written comments can make it easy to forget there is a person on the other side. Before leaving a comment, ask yourself: would I say this if we were sitting next to each other? Or even, how would I word this if I were in person?
Practice receiving without defending
As a presenter, notice the urge to immediately explain, clarify, or justify. Sometimes the most useful response is simply: “That’s interesting. Tell me more.”
You don’t have to agree with feedback to understand it. Create the space to learn something new.
Final thought
I certainly don’t think critique formats are irrelevant. Good facilitation matters, so do clear prompts and thoughtful structures. A well formatted crit can absolutely create better conditions for collaboration; and we should all keep iterating. But no template, framework, or format can replace the harder work of learning how to show up and practice better self-awareness.
The best critiques I’ve been part of were the ones where people trusted each other enough to be honest, were curious enough to notice their own assumptions, and were regulated enough to say they didn’t have the answer.
The work is designing ourselves into better participants in these conversations.
I am a huge advocate for remote-first work, and this point should not be taken as a desire to move away from remote-first working styles. Working remotely is crucial for work/life balance, and is a huge accessibility factor for people like me who live with disabilities. However, it does create an added challenge we need to consider and orient around.
🎶 Volume #10
For each issue, I include three songs I’m into lately:
( ╥﹏╥ ) (motion sickness) by tsubi club
It Gets So Hot by MUNA
SAME LA by Tiffany Day