Friday 14 October 2011

Dunne and Raby Texts: Finding critical design definitions.

-Concept of the future- designer plays significant role in discovering. They cannot do this alone- that's why fields of ethics, philosophy, political science, life sciences and biology is required.
-Space that reflects the complex, troubled people and their environment.
-Stretching to the new limits to understand the space and its environment.
-Design for debate.
-Reflection on values, morals, habits in the space.
-Criticising the way we are, the way we react, the way we live.
-Not only map the social behaviour, but also react to it by imagining journey beyond boundaries, the imaginary future.
-How objects enter people's lives after objects comes into being.
-Producing objects that will raise new questions through experience.
-Provocative architecture.
-Questions must be asked about what we actually need, about the way poetic moments can be intertwined with the everyday and not separated from it.
-Critical design purpose is not to present the dreams of industry, attract new business.Its purpose to stimulate disscusion and debate amongst designers, industry and the public about the aesthetic quality of our electronically mediated existance.
-We don’t view the object as a transmitter of meaning to be decoded by a viewer, but as a prompt, a thing to be engaged with. We think about the experience of physically encountering the work: its size, scale, materiality, degrees of perfection, mass, relationship to the body, etc., and how these might make a person feel and what associations they might trigger.
-Things have to be not-quite-right; this awkwardness is a way into the object, an invitation to explain why it is the way it is, why it’s not quite right.
-The idea of thought experiments—imaginative exercises that help us understand something, expose assumptions, and challenge us to think differently about what is possible.
-Fully engaged projects socially, politically, culturally, and technologically. They are deeply human, challenging, meaningful and reflective. They are issue-based rather than purely formalistic. And they offer a refreshing alternative to narrow corporate visions of the role technology could play in our lives.
-Each project is a testament to the impossibility of the possible. They offer up richer experiences and embody values far broader than those available in existing mass-market products.
-Impossibility of the possible because of the state society need to face; of difficult content that challenges the status quo.
-Critical Design uses speculative design proposals to challenge narrow assumptions, preconceptions and givens about the role products play in everyday life. It is more of an attitude than anything else, a position rather than a method. There are many people doing this who have never heard of the term critical design and 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 subject to discussion and debate. Its opposite is affirmative design: design that reinforces the status quo.
-Activism
Cautionary Tales
Conceptual Design
Contestable Futures
Design Fictions
Interrogative Design
Radical Design
Satire
Social Fiction
Speculative Design

-It's not just about asking questions. It's main purpose is to make us think. But also to raise awareness, expose assumptions, provoke action, spark debate, and even entertain in an intellectual sort of way, like literature or film.
-Addressing new or neglected psychological needs is definitely one way forward. Gadgets already do this and that's why they are so amusing and interesting. A look through any gadget catalogue paints a fascinating portrait of modern life and what it means to be human today. All our fears, anxieties and obsessions are manifest in wonderfully strange products. Now if only they were beautifully designed!
-Difference between fictional functions and functional fictions.
-Design that asks carefully crafted questions and makes us think, is just as important as design that solves problems or finds answers.
-Ideas that count. And of course the stories the objects prompt in peoples' imaginations.
-I think a more useful idea than democratic design is the 'citizen designer', a designer who acts on behalf of society rather than clients and institutions.
-Test of the future.
-It is definitely not art. It might borrow heavily from art in terms of methods and approaches but that's it. We expect art to be shocking and extreme. Critical Design needs to be closer to the everyday, that's where its power to disturb comes from. Too weird and it will be dismissed as art, too normal and it will be effortlessly assimilated.
-We can use design to inspire, raise awareness, stimulate discussion, provoke debate, and even start rumours, all of which eventually might lead to change, and most importantly of all, result in technological futures that reflect the complex, troubled people we are, rather than the easily satisfied consumers and users we are supposed to be.
-Using design as a medium for facilitating discussion between the public and the experts is closely related to the use of scenarios in future forecasting, an approach formalised by Royal Dutch/Shell during the 1970s. But there are a number of differences. Firstly, future scenarios are usually aimed at decision makers in large corporations or governments rather than citizens, consumers or the public. Secondly, they take the form of written documents. In design driven scenarios the results take the form of hypothetical but possible products and services. If traditional scenarios are like screen plays then design scenarios are like props for non existent films.
-Design that asks carefully crafted questions and makes us think, is just as important as design that solves problems or finds answers.


DISCOVERY+SOCIETY+CONCEPT+EXPERIMENT+NARRATIVE= CRITICAL DESIGN?
THINKING+ENVIRONMENT= CRITICAL DESIGN?

I do feel biotechnology and so are not the things I'm very much fascinated about, but on the good side, it broadens up horizons of the concept, context understanding and a new possibilities. Personally for me the most exciting thing about critical design is perhaps playfulness in relation to awareness. Understanding the case study, the space and playing with it, imagining a new concepts that would change the space, experimenting with it. Perhaps looking at the space you never looked this way before.

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