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Instead, they propose that product and industrial design1 can be used to mobilize debate and inquire into matters of concern through the creative processes involved when designing objects.
In design research, where ideological bases rule and theoretical grounding are essential as reference points, critical practice has not been viewed as a serious form of design. It is sustained in a somewhat closed discourse limited to design magazines, niche publications, and gallery showcases. Its theorization and documentation is left to design journalists, bloggers, and curators whose primary agendas are arguably to sell magazines, accumulate hits, or to get the viewing public through gallery doors.
The chapter outlines how critical design is perceived as a form of design research. However, it shows how critical design as a research method is not objective or explanatory, and how it is criticized for not being scientifically rigorous because of the inherent uncertainty to be found in the design process and the objects it produces.
In the essay ‘Critical design – forgotten history or paradigm shift’, Cilla Robach (2005) identified the omission of historical accounts of the practice as one of the most pressing questions facing critical design.
At this time, industrial designers were primarily ‘skinning’ or housing electronics, with little input into the design of the electronics and design of the interactions that would inevitably arise from growth in electronic and digital products.
Philip Agre (1997) and Floyd (2005) outline an approach they term ‘critical technical practice’ that applies critical theory for analysing historical and operational frameworks in the field of artificial intelligence.
So as a term ‘critical design’ originates from the RCA, appearing some twenty years ago in the design research community as a particular approach in human computer interaction. It describes a method of working that the Computer Related Design Studio used in a number of projects between 1994 and 2005.
We first see the term ‘critical design’ introduced by Gaver and Dunne in the paper The Pillow: Artist Designers in the Digital Age (1997).
Rather than being centred on needs and problem-solving, they suggest product design can and should be about ideas and provocation.
The Pillow is an abstract radio used to encourage awareness of the local electro-climate. It picks up mobile phones, pagers, walkie-talkies, and baby monitoring devices. It questions notions of privacy as although the person listening to conversations is a social invader, the radiation from the phone call is invading their home and body.
The design was initially shown as part of the Monitor as Material exhibition (1996). The ambiguous design of the object proved problematic. In the gallery space, the experience of seeing the design is separated from everyday concerns and as a result, the design required explanation. Addressing this, Dunne developed an extrinsic narrative – or scenario of use – in the form of a pseudo-documentary. The documentary titled Pillow Talk features a user interacting with the object. This exercise situates the object in a context of use. The documentary supports the assertion that The Pillow is an
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Sarah Gold’s Alternet (2014) offers a good example of this. The Alternet explores the complex and pressing issue of data privacy through the proposition of an ‘Alternative Internet’ infrastructure that is community-owned, and where the retention of ownership of personal data is paramount. It counters hegemonies that surround Internet and data usage in an age dominated by optimism surrounding the Internet of Things, and the benefits of cloud computing and big data driven by the big four: Microsoft, Apple, Facebook, and Amazon.
The approach resonates with storytelling, but this is a form of storytelling through object, service, and systems design.
In essence, the object draws attention to an invisible and crowded electromagnetic landscape in the domestic context. It asks questions about the implications of this penetrating and leaking electronic radiation, for example, what information is being transmitted, who owns this electromagnetic space, and what are its impacts, etc. Ultimately, the project exposes part of our material and technological culture that normally goes without consideration and is unquestioned in everyday life.
Where the modernist design paradigm was imbued by the conviction that there was an objective, true and good solution to all problems, conceptual design emphasizes problems’ complexity.
In essence, critical design does not offer practical solutions to everyday problems; instead, it seeks to meet peoples’ emotional
Rhetorical use in critical practice is established by constructing narratives of use. This means designing the object’s context and the presentation of scenarios that give meaning to the object. This is often achieved with media that is external to and situates the design object. Typically, this takes the form of film, images, photomontage, and vignette.
This encourages the user to imagine the object in their lives, while simultaneously creating a dilemma of interpretation within the user. This dilemma of interpretation encourages the user to question the qualities of the object and the narrative of use that contextualize it. It is within this dilemma of interpretation, and in the suspension of disbelief, that questions can be asked of the product design and of the designer’s critical position.
The Near Future Laboratory designers’, Julian Bleecker and Nicolas Nova, Slow Messenger (2009) offers another example of discursive commentary through design intervention and playful experiment. Through the design of the world’s slowest instant messenger, the designers explore how in a digitally networked era contact is perpetual and ubiquitous. The device delivers a message through a deliberately primitive text display that turns the torrent into a trickle and the user has to wait for the message to reveal. Implemented as hardware, it uses a 96×64 pixel display; the design questions how our
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The app searches your communications for National Security Agency trigger words and then sends text fragments containing these words to the badge worn by the user for public display. Using the body as an instrument for protest, the badge becomes a means of rendering our own voice visible in an otherwise faceless technological panopticon.
Feral Dogs consists of hacked robotic toys with integrated environmental sensors so that they behave in particular ways in response to environmental contaminants. Feral Dogs is a compelling example of how
As an example of relational ambiguity, Björn Franke’s Traces of an Imaginary Affair (2006) allows the user to self-harm to feel self-worth. The design relies on the understanding that self-harm is wrong but questions through juxtaposition tension and contradiction how harming can instil value and worth.
Humour is important in critical design practice; projects are often playful, and on occasion seem obscure due to their characteristics and elaborate scenarios of use.
Design speculating in this way questions if these design practices are a better way to develop practical understandings for engineers, designers, and applied scientists of their roles in shaping social conditions and technological futures. In short, this is because facts and solutions end debates but evocative design opens up debates and is a powerful way to question hegemonic thinking.
the approaches attempt to enhance the critical distance between the object and the human subject through the introduction of poetic techniques of aesthetic, fiction, defamiliarization, estrangement, designing ambiguity, and producing non-rational objects.
While critical design might heavily borrow from [art] methods and approaches, it definitely is not art. We expect art to explore extremes, but critical design needs to be close to the everyday and the ordinary as that is where it derives its power to disturb and question assumptions. […] It is only when read as design that critical designs can suggest that the everyday as we know it could be different – that things could change. (Raby 2008, 95)
A traditional design’s success is often measured by how well it has worked within certain constraints, by the qualities of the idea, and by how well the idea has been executed using frameworks in which objects are ‘fit for purpose’ and of ‘good form’ – concepts that ultimately relate to the essentialist view of function and efficient use. Therefore, the challenge is to develop the means, the understanding, and the language to critique critical design.
The difficulty in critiquing and discussing critical design practice comes about because, unlike traditional designers, critical designers primarily focus on the communication of an idea, rather than the development of a product or service. Criticizing something that, like some art, defines its purpose as raising debate and communicating ideas is difficult. In effect, any criticism of the work can be perceived as debate and therefore can be seen as confirming its success.
He shows that function is not limited to practicality in use and classifies five very different types of function: • Structural articulation, which refers to the object’s material structure; • Physical function, which refers to the utilitarian task of the object; • Psychological function, which pertains to the user’s emotional response to the object; • Social function, which refers to the nature of the activity that the object provides with regard to the social dimension; and • Cultural-existential function, which has more profound cultural and symbolic characteristics that include the
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‘Design exploration’ is similar to design practice but differs in one key point in that it aims to explore ‘what if’ questions through the process of designing, rather than by answering a particular research problem. Design exploration is a way to comment on a phenomenon by developing an artefact that embodies the statement or question that the researcher is attempting to critique.
The family prays to their shrine, which hosts a 3D printer. As the family prays, the deity takes shape in front of their eyes. The smart shrine is printing a Ganesh idol with Ganges’s mud as the family prays.
In the horatian approach, the designer takes either an existing work that was created with a serious purpose, or an object with reputable characteristics, and then makes the work look ridiculous by infusing it with incongruous ideas.
This is achieved by presenting it in inappropriate forms, remaking it by using inappropriate materials or by subverting the context in which it might be used.
A serious subject may be treated frivolously or a frivolous subject seriously.
Rationality, narrative, and satire each interlink. The more rational an object is, the more laconic the critique and the critical move is established through horatian satire. Where there is a need for an extrinsic allegoric narrative, the objects are less rational and the critical move established through juvenalian forms of satire.
The discussion charted a history from Radical Design in the Italian tradition; Anti-Design, New Design, and Conceptual Design in the German and Dutch traditions; and critical practice in HCI, Interaction Design, and Critical Technical Practice. Associative, speculative, and critical design projects carried out today are heavily influenced by the methods and approaches developed in these preceding practices and are influenced by the anti-capitalist, anti-commercial, ethically led, and activist ideologies that informed these earlier modes of critical practice.
This discussion of function was useful because it established that critical design practice operates through a system of ‘rhetorical use’. Rhetorical use was introduced as a form of symbolic and intellectual use. This use is afforded through the designer’s projection of the object in material form, and imagination on the part of the user. Rhetorical use is just as legitimate as practical use.
Amidst attitudes of dissatisfaction and frustration with the status quo – in disciplinary, technological, and societal contexts – there is a collective refusal by the critical designers discussed throughout this book to abandon product design practice.
