Notes from it’s introduction.
Design, Critique, and the Ambiguity of “Change from Within”
This section frames the historical tension between design and critique. While design has repeatedly been mobilized as a site for critical, speculative, and utopian intervention, it has also been deeply entangled with maintaining dominant socio-political and economic orders. Critical design emerges as an internal critique, yet its transformative capacity remains structurally constrained.
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Critique is practiced inside design, using its own tools and modes.
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Design attempts to change itself from within but remains structurally constrain
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Design is ontological: it brings worlds into being.
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Artifacts escape intention and create unintended futures.
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This history has been marked by numerous attempts to tie together the logics and needs of design, technology and society in critical, speculative and utopian ways and change design from within.
As much as these and other critical design movements have been thought to change the world from within design, they have hardly ever been able to overcome their Anglo-European biases.
These examples from Bauhaus to Critical Design show the ambiguity and compromises omnipresent in the tense relation between design and critique. As much as design has been instrumentalized to cement the socio-political and commercial status quo and project it into the future, there has always been the desire and hope that the same practices and concepts could be reframed, reimagined and converted to critique the present and propose alternative futures.
Critical practice, in the words of design researcher Ramia Mazé, is often regarded as «a kind of ‹criticism from within› design – that is based on and carried out by design means, by designers and by means of their own practical and operational modes» (Mazé 2016: para. 1).
Making new devices, objects and technologies is like opening Pandora’s Box: once created and in the world, artificial things create a life of their own, which does not always correspond to what their creators had hoped for.
The question of design is, as Tony Fry has noted, «always an ontological question», while at the same time design is «a domain of metaphysical knowledge», in that it «always arrives as the way something acts as, in and on the world, and as a learnt thinking (theory) that informs practices which bring something into being» (Fry [1999] 2020: 4).
Critique as a Practice of Uncertainty and Agency
Drawing on Foucault, critique is framed not as a stable position of judgment but as a contradictory, future-oriented practice that engages uncertainty. Critique does not resolve ambiguity; rather, it works within it as a means of regaining agency.
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Critique is contradictory, future-oriented, and unresolved.
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It deals with uncertainty rather than eliminating it.
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According to French philosopher Michel Foucault, from whom this idea derives, critique must be seen as something essentially relative and contradictory; as a symptom of incomprehensibility and uncertainty, and at the same time as an attempt to make this uncertainty graspable and controllable.
Critique therefore refers to what is coming, what is possible, what has been passed over and what has been missed out.
As Foucault wrote: «Critique only exists in relation to something other than itself: it is an instrument, a means for a future or a truth that it will not know nor happen to be, it oversees a domain it would want to police and is unable to regulate» (Foucault [1997] 2007: 42).
Critique, in other words, is a way of dealing with uncertainty and of regaining agency.
Situated Knowledge and the Problem of Universalism
Both design and critique are understood as situated practices shaped by context, power, and positionality. Universalist claims about design’s problem-solving capacity are challenged for reproducing asymmetrical power–knowledge relations.
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Design and critique are situated, contextual, and partial.
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Universalist claims are deeply political.
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Both design and critique must therefore be seen and problematized as forms of situated knowledge (Haraway 1988), shaped by and confined to specific contexts, persons and situations.
For a long time, many design scholars saw the greatest potential of design in its ability to improve people’s living conditions and to solve complex problems – independent of the problem or context.
As stated above, this view has been repeatedly questioned and problematized in recent years, as it is often based on asymmetrical power–knowledge structures and false universalist ideas of design, knowledge, technology and progress.
Eurocentrism and Coloniality in Critical and Speculative Design
Critical and speculative design practices are themselves subject to critique for reproducing Eurocentric and colonial imaginaries. Speculative futures often reflect the designers’ sociocultural positions while excluding alternative histories, presents, and perspectives.
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Speculative design often reproduces Eurocentric futures.
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Singular narratives erase alternative pasts and presents.
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Against this background, projects from the field of Critical and Speculative Design, although they might appear less «solutionist» or «affirmative» at first sight, were also problematized because of their unquestioned Eurocentric and colonial biases.
By discussing concrete examples from the field of Critical and Speculative Design, Pedro J.S. Vieira de Oliveira and Luiza Prado de O. Martins (2019) have shown how much the speculative visions of the future are shaped by the sociocultural background of the designers creating these visions, and how little the Eurocentric view – the colonial «gaze» – often underlying them is questioned.
«There is no space for questioning where that scenario came from, what sequences of events preceded it … There is only space for one narrative – the one devised by the designer; no rough edges, no place for those who cannot afford to have their stories up for display» (Vieira de Oliveira and Prado de O. Martins 2019: 107).
In contrast, «that speculation needs to be enacted in transient spaces in which any perspective could become a loose thread for exploring the future or an amalgamation of untold pasts and uncertain presents» (Vieira de Oliveira / Prado de O. Martins 2019: 109).
From Problem-Solving to Problem-Finding
Critical design is reframed as a practice of questioning problem definitions themselves rather than offering solutions. This shift foregrounds politics, history, and systemic conditions over instrumental outcomes.
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Critical design should question problem definitions themselves.
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Problems are political and historically constructed.
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Ramia Mazé believes that, instead of being «concerned with problem-solving», critical design practice should rather be about «problem finding» (Mazé 2009: 381).
This means that critical design practice should be about fundamentally questioning problem definitions and problem-solving approaches with regard to their inherent political interests and seeing things in a larger historical and systemic context.
Criticality, Embodiment, and Un-Learning
Summary
Criticality is described as an embodied, engaged condition rather than detached analysis. It requires processes of un-learning and re-learning and resists accumulation of knowledge as progress.
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Critical design should question problem definitions themselves.
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Problems are political and historically constructed.
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Critique, or better yet criticality, as she defines it (Rogoff 2003), is thus not necessarily characterized by analytical distance or theoretical superiority, but rather by the unique opportunity of embodied involvement, by bringing together «that being studied and those doing the studying, in an indelible unity» (Rogoff 2006).
Criticality cannot arise simply by adding something new to existing knowledge, but it is, again, about the painstaking process of un- and relearning.
What might a contemporary critical design practice look like that is committed, involved, courageous and robust, but is not so elitist, naïve and short-sighted as to be misused and turned against itself?
Design as Critical Material Practice
This section introduces the central framing of design as a materially embodied form of critique, distinct from text-based critique in the humanities. Design’s symbolic and material dimensions enable critique through action, making, and intervention.
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Design critiques through objects, spaces, images—not just text.
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Material form can provoke reflection and action.
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One aspect that has been important for the conception of this anthology is the question of the different embodiments and socio-material entanglements of design as critical material practice.
Whereas in the humanities critique is usually expressed in the form of language and text (which obviously also have a practical and material dimension), in the field of design we can observe a trend to exercise critique in an explicitly embodied and materialized way: through interventions in urban spaces, speculative design objects, fictional film scenarios or thought-provoking images.
The idea that the symbolic–material dimension of design can trigger both action and thought is not only currently driving many design scholars and practitioners, but was adopted (at least partially) by earlier critical design movements.
Designerly Ways of Knowing and Material Epistemology
Design is positioned as a distinct knowledge culture with its own epistemologies, centered on making and material configuration. This challenges divisions between theory and practice and between natural and artificial systems.
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Design has its own epistemology rooted in making.
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Often marginalized compared to sciences and humanities.
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«Design has its own distinct ‹things to know, ways of knowing them, and ways of finding out about them›», claimed design researcher Nigel Cross (1982: 221).
Design knowledge, according to him, is manifested through «people, processes and products» (Cross 2006: 101).
Bruce Archer described design research as «systematic enquiry whose goal is knowledge of, or in, the embodiment of configuration, composition, structure, purpose, value and meaning in man-made things and systems» (Archer 1981: 31).
For them and many other design researchers, design represents an independent but often neglected area of practical making and material epistemology that is not covered by the natural sciences and humanities.
Design Beyond Designers and Its Capture by Capitalism
Design is understood as a general mode of action rather than a professional monopoly. However, under neoliberal capitalism, creativity and critique are systematically absorbed into market logics, producing precarity and constant pressure to innovate.
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Creativity is absorbed into neoliberal markets.
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Leads to precarity and self-exploitation.
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As Horst Rittel put it, «Everybody designs sometimes; nobody designs always. Design is not the monopoly of those who call themselves ‹designers›» (Rittel 1988: 1).
Following the authors Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello, every creative act or artistic expression, however innovative, rebellious or critical it may seem, is eventually transformed into a consumable product or service.
In the logic of late capitalist and neoliberal markets, creativity has long since ceased to be a unique characteristic reserved for artists and designers, but has become an encompassing social imperative that affects all professional groups equally (Reckwitz 2017).
This includes not only the constant pressure to reinvent and change things, but also the acceptance of flexible – that is, precarious – working conditions and uncertain, project-based employment (Raunig et al. 2011).
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