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)