week 12. what is critical about critical design

What is "critical" about critical design?

1. ...coined by Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby. Critical design

is a form of research aimed at leveraging designs to make

consumers more critical about their everyday lives, and in

particular how their lives are mediated by assumptions,

values, ideologies, and behavioral norms inscribed in de-

sign.

2.  ...HCI, critical design is not used very much in HCI. One reason

might be that HCI researchers do not know how to do it

[4].

 

3. (Gaver 否定其設計是批判設計)

Also,

there is confusion about whether design work that has been

featured in HCI—most notably projects coming out of

Goldsmiths—are or are not at all critical design. [4] and

[29] for example both group Goldsmith’s work together

with critical design, a characterization hotly disputed by

Bill Gaver (personal communications).

4. 

ORIGINS AND GOALS OF CRITICAL DESIGN

The Frankfurt School of critical theory, embodied in the

works of Horkheimer, Adorno, and Marcuse, argued that

products of mass media and consumer culture were politically

regressive(退化的).  In developing this argument, Adorno offered

a concept he called reification(物化的), which “refers to the

way that things are produced by society, including the way

that it is organized, appear as entirely natural and beyond

question [28, p.172]....Simplifying, the basic idea is

that dominant social classes maintain their dominance by

disseminating a system of myths presenting the status quo

as natural and good (this is ideology) which encourages the

working class to buy into a system that works against its

own interest (this is alienation)(異化). Consumer culture is the key

mechanism of this system: movies, magazines, and design

represent and implement a collection of norms and behaviors

that condition the working class (this is reification物化).

"Reification is the process of treating an abstract concept or social relationship as a concrete, independent "thing," while alienation is a broader feeling of estrangement or disconnect."

5.  Dunne & Rabby 雖然拉開與批判理論的距離，但是在論述中卻大量使用法蘭克福學派的術語。

Although Dunne and Raby in an interview distance critical

design from the Frankfurt School [16], their formulation of

critical design has unmistakable affinities with it:

Product genre…offers a very limited experience. Like

a Hollywood movie, the emphasis is on easy pleasure

and conformist values. This genre reinforces the status

quo rather than challenging it. We are surrounded by

products that give us an illusion of choice and encourage

passivity. But industrial design’s position at the

heart of consumer culture (it is fuelled by the capitalist

system, after all) could be subverted for more socially

beneficial ends by providing a unique aesthetic medium

that engages the user’s imagination [15, p.45]

Their language “illusion of choice,” “passivity,” “reinforces

the status quo,” “easy pleasure and conformist values,” and

“fuelled by the capitalist system” bear the unmistakable

stamp of the Frankfurt view of ideology.

 

6.

designers are ethically implicated one way or

another in the problem domain of social domination no

matter what we do. Dunne and Raby sketch out two opposing

ethical positions that design inevitably participates in:

Design can be described as falling into two very broad

categories: affirmative design and critical design. The

former reinforces how things are now, it conforms to

cultural, social, technical, and economic expectation.

Most design falls into this category. The latter rejects

how things are now as being the only possibility, it

provides a critique of the prevailing situation through

designs that embody alternative social, cultural, technical,

or economic values. [15, p.58]

Critical design, like Frankfurt School critical theory before

it, is a research strategy dedicated to transgressing and undermining

social conformity, passivity, and similar values

of capitalist ideology, in hopes of bringing about social

emancipation.

Dunne

describes critical design as “a form of social research,” so

its primary intended outcome is knowledge, not a design

product. For Dunne and Raby, its purpose is to “seduce the

viewer into the world of ideas rather than objects” [14,

p.147], and “to make us think. But also raising awareness,

exposing assumptions, provoking

Dunne and Raby offer few specifics on how this is done,

and they characterize critical design as more of an “attitude”

than a “method.”

It names some design values of

global capitalism—conformity, obedience, easy pleasure,

and corporate identity, among others. It challenges designers

and consumers alike to envision—and to demand—

design products that reflect a more challenging view of human

needs and experience, including engaging the sorts of

dark pleasures that the best literature and film engage.

7. CRITIQUING CRITICAL DESIGN

 

誰來決定一件設計是affirmative or critical 才是關鍵

Since affirmative design is a pejorative (貶抑的), and critical

design is an honorific (尊敬的), the question of who gets to decide

whether a design is affirmative or critical is key.

日本的設計在西方人來看是批判，但真的是嗎

The stated binarism of the affirmative/critical opposition

also cannot deal with the well known fact that capitalism is

extremely fast at appropriating countercultural signifiers

and commercializing them for the mainstream, e.g.,

Vivienne Westwood’s appropriation of punk visuality into

haute couture.

Critical Design is Not Art

...

With that background, let us consider the two arguments

that Dunne and Raby make to refuse the art designation for

critical design. One is that art is isolated from the everyday

and its messages easily bracketed aside by the public as

“just art,” but design is a part of the everyday and has more

potential to disturb the everyday [15, p.58;17]. The other is

that art is “shocking and extreme,” but critical design

“needs to be closer to the everyday, that’s where the power

to disturb comes from” [17].

藝術與批判設計並非本體上的差異

Dunne and Raby’s writings: “The critical sensibility,

at its most basic, is simply about not taking things

for granted, to question and look beneath the surface”

8.

RECONSTITUTING CRITICAL DESIGN

批判設計的定義: critical design is a design research practice that

foregrounds the ethical positioning of designers; this practice

is suspicious of the potential for hidden ideologies that

can harm the public; it optimistically seeks out, tries out,

and disseminates new design values; it seeks to cultivate

critical awareness in designers and consumers alike in, by

means of, and through designs; it views this activity as

democratically participatory.

• Critical theory refers to the family of skeptical sociocultural

critique with origins in the philosophy of Marx of

Nietzsche. It includes the Frankfurt School of critical

theory and the explosion of critical theory between the

1950s and 1980s, which included semiotics, poststructuralism,

feminism, psychoanalysis, and Marxism.

• Metacriticism refers to attempts to answer questions

such as: What are the categories of criticism? How do

we distinguish good from bad criticism? What is the social

role of criticism? Generally, it is concerned with

skilled appreciation of the arts and can be found in the

English-language tradition of literary criticism (e.g., Arnold,

Frye, Eliot, Abrams, and Bloom) and analytic aesthetics

(e.g., Beardsley, Cavell, and Carroll).

9. Critical Theory

方法論

1. 懷疑的詮釋學 Carroll calls “the hermeneutics of suspicion,”

2.辯證法 dialectics that foreground conflicts and historical specificity within societies, eras,

situations, events, etc., which are normally presented as unified and timeless.

3.烏托邦思維 utopian thinking, which imagines realistic but genuinely better worlds or societies

10. Metacriticism

方法論

Noël Carroll

describes criticism as comprising six fundamental activities:

description, classification, context-providing, elucidation,

interpretation, and analysis [11].

1. 描述

2. 分類

3. 提供脈絡

4. 闡明

5. 詮釋

6. 分析

Potential uptakes for critical design. Critical design’s

ability to inculcate (諄諄教誨) critical thought and the imagination of

alternative futures is dependent on how insightfully people

can read designs: aesthetic perception, imagination, insight,

and experience are not effects simply caused by visual

stimuli (no matter what HCI research says on the subject);

they are the result of a skilled and expert cultural subject’s

efforts.

11. 

What Makes Critical Design Critical

(1) Perspective-shifting holistic understandings.

與科學不同，批判要求全面性

Criticism frequently works in

the other direction, combining a literary detail, an experiential

effect, a historical detail, and a speculative theory together

to produce a unifying account that explains all of the

above—not to be correct but to suggest new modes of understanding

it.

(2) Theory as speculation

For both critical theory and metacriticism,

theory makes no claim to be “right” in the way

that scientific theories do....

“The philosopher … turns to

the reader not to convince him without proof but to get him

to prove something, test something, against himself” 

(3) A dialogic methodology

our own horizons are fused with

those of the classic, and in that luminous moment we experience

new alignments of our own thoughts and come out of

it transformed [23,28].

(4) Improvement of the public’s cultural competence. 

Critical theory models ways to read skeptically, to be suspicious

of false harmonies and false pleasures; metacriticism models

ways to perceive and read with unparalleled sensitivity

and insight.

So if we want to understand what makes critical design

“critical,” the preceding list gives us our answer: a design

research project may be judged “critical” to the extents

that it proposes a perspective-changing holistic account of

a given phenomenon, and that this account is grounded in

speculative theory, reflects a dialogical methodology, improves

the public’s cultural competence, and is reflexively

aware of itself as an actor—with both power and constraints—

within the social world it is seeking to change. (p. 3304)

期末開始 Final Project Kickoff

Next week

1. your own "Make-it-critical" cards

2. review your own mid-term project and propose possible issues (introduced by PK)

week 11. critical design & critical theory

Critical design and critical theory: the challenge of designing for provocation

http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2318001


1. p288
   Designers' judgement vs. analysis & reasoning activity


Over the past two decades, there has been increasing interest in design in human-computer interaction. Of particular
concern is constructive design research [27], also known as
research through design [16, 18, 33, 35], where design activity in the form of constructing artifacts becomes a central
research activity. In this work, design experience in the
form of designers’ judgments is equally important to the
analysis and reasoning activities that are common to all
kinds of research.

2.
   constructive design 可以從 “想像未來" 展開, 不一定要 fieldwork, theory...


Like other kinds of research, constructive 
design research may start from the result of fieldwork, theories of human behavior, or application of a particular design
approach, but often, it can start with just imagining future 
states, and in HCI, how technology can improve the current
state of human existence.

3. critical design 的定義, by Dunne:
  吸引 viewers 進入 the world of ideas 而非 objects.


producing conceptual electronic products that encourage
complex and meaningful reflection on inhabitation of a
ubiquitous, dematerializing, and intelligent environment: a
form of social research to integrate critical aesthetic experience with everyday life…. I hope in my approach I have
retained the popular appeal of industrial design while using
it to seduce the viewer into the world of ideas rather than
objects. Industrial design locates its object in a mental
space concerned with identity, desire, and fantasy and
shaped by media.... Again, I hope this remains intact but is
subverted to challenge the aesthetic values of both consumers and designers. (p. 147)

4. p. 289



In short, critical design
proposes an approach to provocation（挑釁), rather than design as
rearranging surface features according to the latest fashion
while obfuscating (使困惑) the norms and conventions inscribed in
the designs and their use.


5.


A new
book on constructive design research details three different
approaches: Lab, Field, and Showroom [27].

...

In the  Field examples, design researchers
employ lightweight versions of social science methods to
understand the current state, and then use methods from
design practice to create new things that express a preferred
state.





 Showroom, Koskinen et al.’s term for critical
design, is different. The description in the book talks about
the theoretical influences, but does provide a sketch of how
methods might be put together to complete a project.

6. In other words,
one might desire a description of critical design as an approach to account for both (a) productsthat generate dilemmas or confusions among users in such a way that users
are encouraged to expand their interpretative horizons or
rethink cultural norms; and (b) the sorts of design processes
that could lead to those kinds of products. 

7.  p. 290

  4 種 整合 critical theory 和 design 的 困難:

(1) Critical theory offers little insight about how to make 
things.

  CT: a verbal tradition,  new theories, critiques, and insights
  D: an embodied making tradition,  design materials

(2) Critical theory tends to be anti-method.

(3) Critical theory emphasizes the meanings and effects of cultural artifacts over their creation.
(4) Critical theory generally tends not to focus on the author of  a work as an individual creative agent

critical theory 不關心 intention (of author)

But if design can be defined as intentional change [30],
critical theory’s disinterest in intention becomes a limitation
of its applicability to design.


8.
  我們已經習慣  不受限於 creators' intention


We, too, were trained to seek
to understand the effects of cultural artifacts without limiting our inquiry to what their creators intended. Likewise,
we can understand why Gaver, like Derrida before him,
rejects “method” as a description of his approach. 


9.
What we seek, then, is a middle ground between critical
design as an elitist mystery, like art itself, and critical design as a step-wise cookbook description of design practice.
We recognize that the subjective expertise of the designer is
a crucial factor that no method, approach, set of practices,
etc., can capture or simulate.

THE CRITICAL DESIGN PROCESS
10.
  先找出 挑釁的點

Among
the most basic decisions in a critical design project is identifying which aspects of the present world we wish to provoke, a process that can be enriched through an engagement
with relevant critical theory literatures.


11.  2 cases of critical design

Significant Screwdriver (SS)


As  a starting point, it seemed to us that design could be used to  transgress rather then reinforce social norms.

Whispering Wall (WW)

Another place where we might transgress rather then reinforce social norms was in the space of a health club or gym.


12.


Breakdowns in operationalizing critical theory in design
often occur because whereas theory is often descriptive,
providing frameworks or models that serve as organizing
constructs [17], design itself is actionable, creating prototypes that suggest preferred future states. As in any design
activity, in making the leap from descriptive to generative,
the designer must make judgments about how to proceed.

13.

This breakdown exposes that
in critical design, the linkage between (verbally-based) theory and the embodied design practices of decision-making
and observations of use in deployment is problematic.
Overcoming this is not something that can be derived from
critical theory resources alone (i.e., in this case, feminist
theory only got us so far), due to the fact that design as critical resource  and  textual discourses about design  are different kinds of epistemological resources. 

14. p.294

   輕微的  陌異化 是關鍵


As
Dunne and Raby write, “A slight strangeness is the key—
too weird and they are instantly dismissed, not strange
enough and they’re absorbed into everyday reality…” [15,
p.63].

輕微的  陌異化  可以考量跨越 conceptual, functional, material, aesthetic 等等層面.

Our experience suggests that achieving this “slight
strangeness” is anything but straightforward, as it plays out
across conceptual, functional, material, and aesthetic dimensions of design in complex ways. Often, designers rapidly generate and iterate on solutions as a way to reason
about a problem space; when the problem space itself is
transgression and provocation, some of our more familiar
strategies will undoubtedly come up short.


15.
  how design students do vs. engineering ones:


As designers, we have considerable experience evaluating
sketches, directions, and prototypes in the context of design
briefs and situations—even ill-defined ones—both in the
studio and in the field.

16.


Provocation can be socially uncomfortable, and subjects
may not expect to be provoked when consenting to participate in a study. Researchers need to be prepared for and be
ready to handle such discomfort.



17.

Indeed, it was through conversations in which he was initiated as a peer researcher, rather than research subject, that
this participant gradually began to buy into it.

18. p. 295


Both of these patterns suggest that in a critical design study,
not only does the research destabilize the topics of inquiry,
but it also destabilizes the relationship between researchers
and research participants.



19.

In short, design researchers deploying
critical designs need to be prepared for everything to be
challenged, negotiated, and subject to fundamental change. 

20.

Critical design as a discursive methodology


Critical Design 中, 連 framing 也是 unknown:

In traditional user research, the research objective is to establish user needs and requirements. What is unknown are
relevant behaviors, attitudes, and functional needs of a target population. In critical design research, the framing itself 
is part of the unknown.



...

We were not out to discover folk theories of gender in
gyms and homes; the critical designs were meant to transgress them and provoke discussionabout that. 

21.
  重點不是收集使用者所說的話, 而是 協同思索與推思索與推論

we
didn’t just collect what they said but engaged with them
intellectually—the result was a practice of collaborative 
speculative reasoning grounded on a critical design that was
itself informed by a combination of cultural theories and
folk theories.

22.
   3 lessons from critical designs:

(1) Provocativeness
(2) Deep relationship

When using critical design in the future, we will design the
prototypes and interactions with participants with the goal
of developing a deeper relationship. We allow for repeated
and rich encounters in order to explore how participants’
insights and behaviors change as they use the design to
probe the research team’s intentions. 

(3) Fluidity of research plan

..., it seems that critical design
might best use theory to sensitize designers and to inspire
the intention of the provocations, but that we cannot and
should not force that theory to delimit the trajectory of the
work once it has been placed into the world. We raise this
as a concern for others who may wish to use critical design
as a way of operationalizing a theoretical framework.

Case Studies:
 "Make It Critical" card deck

   https://www.linkedin.com/posts/mdstallings_im-thrilled-to-have-received-my-copy-of-activity-7313916384428662785-Gqh2/

Ethics-Focused Design Methods:

Surveying a Landscape of Ethics-Focused Design Methods

liminality & critical design: (in-betweenness, liminality 閾限性 如何 fit 批判設計精神?)

Charting In-Betweenness Through Sensory Imaginaries, Linguistic Musings, and Critical Design

2025/11/24

Create your own "Make It Critical" cards in terms of "urban play", "flaneur", "liminal experience", "GAI hallucination", "ethic issue"...

Present and Practice in the class in group

week 10. humanistic HCI

Humanistic HCI in ACM Interaction

專家主觀性 expert subjectivity

1. HCI reaches out. 
"Key examples include the rise of aesthetics as an approach to user experience design [2]; the introduction of “reflective HCI” [3] to reposition the field with a more self-critical stance; as well as the use of feminist [4], queer [5], and postcolonial [6] approaches to emancipatory computing."

2. The humanities reach in.
" As alternatives, Winograd and Flores introduced Heideggerian phenomenology, biological accounts of cognition and language, and speech act theory to HCI. Offering an epistemological critique of the field as a whole and introducing an alternative epistemological stance are philosophical activities. It is easy to see that Winograd and Flores’s seminal work was in fact humanistic HCI, even if no one at that time was using the term."

3. What is Humanistic HCI?
". It is not the same as digital humanities, which is humanistic research supported by digital technologies, and which is by and large practiced by humanistic scholars (see, e.g., [9])."

"Humanistic HCI operates in the opposite direction: It is HCI research and practice that is supported by humanistic practices, theories, and methods."

4. History and tradition
"Many HCI systems are presented with little to no reference to their own historical genealogies, and the field itself has no significant histories beyond a generally shared sense that HCI has had three paradigms or waves [13,14]."

" Our expectation is that interaction design and/or HCI (whatever their relation is or will become, exactly) will develop much more of a historical sensibility in the coming decade."

5. Conceptual analysis
" During its rise in the 19th century, science began to displace philosophy as the knowledge discipline best able to account for the world. What was philosophy’s role in a scientific era? One answer was that philosophy ceased to provide doctrines and instead became an activity directed at the clarification of thoughts. As the early Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote, “The object of philosophy is the logical clarification of thoughts. Philosophy is not a theory but an activity. A philosophical work consists essentially of elucidations” [15]. Philosophy was thus moving away from producing original systems and toward the disciplined analysis of the concepts we think with."

Summary:
" overall humanistic dispositions: the attempt to take on a situation or work that is in some sense confusing; to do so holistically (rather than analyzed and operationalized into well-defined parts); to bring clarity to it; and to do so in a way that orients itself toward emancipatory change (diversely defined)."

Humanistic HCI  Practices and Methods
1. Excursus: The expert subject.
2. Interaction criticism.
3. Critical discourse analysis.
   " HCI examples of such critiques include studies of cultural probes [25], affective computing [26], and sustainable making [27]."
4. Critical social science

      abduction rather than deduction or induction
5. Design futuring.
 "These strategies are commonly deployed in speculative design, critical design, design fictions, and science and utopian fiction"
6. Emancipatory HCI.


Reference:

Humanistic HCI (book)