The overuse of the word interesting, when in this case, referring to examples of design, is something I am guilty of doing, when referring to everything else as well.
Google lists over 9,000,000 results for interesting design amidst images and web pages. I’ve heard the word used equally as much during my life in the classroom, and it makes me groan each time. When I was a student, my classmates loved talking about interesting things like movies and music. We loved looking at interesting design, and reading interesting philosophy. The word was as vacuous during that pseudo-intellectual heyday as it is now. I still hear it pronounced like it means something, but overcoming that word is the first step to succeeding in a critique.
Time to break out the thesaurus.
What one person considers to be interesting is likely to depend on what they’re interested in - and that varies from one person to the next. Flickr has an “interestingness” algorithm, but I think it’s only useful when you do an image search (as opposed to seeing the “most interesting images” on the site). In that case, surely the images that come up in the search should be ordered by “relevance” rather than whether the system considers them to be “interesting”? They seem to do it both ways, and I’ve yet to find anything actually *useful* when using the interesting search.
“Useful” can be as subjective as “interesting” though. One person’s gold can be another’s junk. Out of interest, have you tried FFFFOUND! for image searches?