Critical design
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Critical design, popularized by Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby, uses designed artifacts as an embodied critique or commentary on consumer culture. Both the designed artifact (and subsequent use) and the process of designing such an artifact causes reflection on existing values, mores, and practices in a culture. A critical design will often challenge its audience's preconceptions and expectations thereby provoking new ways of thinking about the object, its use, and the surrounding environment. The term Critical Design was first used in Anthony Dunne’s book Hertzian Tales (1999). Its opposite is affirmative design: design that reinforces the status quo. It is more of an attitude than style or movement; a position rather than a method. There are many people doing this kind of work who have never heard of the term critical design who have their own way of describing what they do. Naming it Critical Design is simply a useful way of making this activity more visible and emphasising that design has other possibilities beyond solving problems. Critical Designers generally believe design that provokes, inspires, makes us think, and questions fundamental assumptions can make a valuable contribution to debates about the role technology plays in everyday life.
Design as critique is not a new idea. For example, Italian Radical Design of the 1960s and 70s was highly critical of prevailing social values and design ideologies. Critical design builds on this tradition.
Dunne & Raby and other teachers, researchers and graduates of the Royal College of Art (RCA) such as James Auger,Crispin Jones and Noam Toran, are well known practitioners of this area of design, but there are other designers working in a similar way who would not necessarily describe what they do as critical design: Krzysztof Wodiczko, Natalie Jeremijenko, Jurgen Bey, Marti Guixé, Elio Caccavale, ...
See also:
- Activism
- Cautionary Tales
- Conceptual Design
- Contestable Futures
- Design Fiction
- Interrogative Design
- Radical Design
- Satire
- Social Fiction
- Speculative Design
[edit] External Links
- Anthony Dunne, Hertzian Tales, The MIT Press, 2006
- Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby, Design Noir, Birkhauser, 2001
- Dunne & Raby
- Noam Toran
- Crispin Jones
- Elio Caccavale
- Martí Guixé
- Natalie Jeremijenko
- Jurgen Bey
- Auger Loizeau
- Troika
- Designing Critical Design (exhibition)
- Designing Critical Design, part 1
- Designing Critical Design, part 2
- How should we critique ‘Critical Design’?
- Critical Design and nanotech
- Don't Panic by Roger Ibars (article)
- Don’t Panic Emergent Critical Design (exhibition)
- Review of Don't Panic
- Critical Design F.A.Q
