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)

week 8. (10/20) Hertzian Tales (chap 3)

 泛功能 - 赫茲故事第三章

The prefix “para-” suggests that such design is

within the realms of utility but attempts to go beyond conventional definitions

of functionalism to include the poetic.

泛功能（超越功能）超越傳統定義，包含了詩意。

Eccentric Objects: Para-functionality and Non-design

Some naive, curious, or eccentric objects, outside the world of conventional design,

unintentionally embody provocative or poetic qualities that most product

designs, even those intended to provoke, seldom achieve.

某些天真的、好奇的、古怪的物件，落在傳統設計之外，它們偶然地賦予了挑臖的和詩意的品質，是多數產品設計即使刻意追求也很少達成的。

This is also the case with “Chindogu”. Their individual

elements are recognizable, but the reason for combining them is at first bewildering.

The meaning behind the object is derived from “sense-fiction”: the objects

make functional sense, but are still useless.

Forbidden Emotions: Para-functionality and Design

In a field where　“product design is thoroughly integrated in capitalist production, [and] bereft　of an independent critical tradition on which to base an alternative,” only a few

designers use the function of products as criticism.

在產品設計完全整合在資本主義產製的領域，失去了獨立批判的傳統，只有一些設計師使用產品功能作為批判。

...what Baudrillard has called the “crisis of functionalism.”

Baudrillard (1981) argues that the acceptance of functionalism as an arbitrary

but dominant rationality gave rise to an irrational counter-discourse that

moves between the two poles of kitsch (庸俗作品) and surrealism:

The surrealist object emerges at the same epoch as the functional object, as its derision (嘲笑)

and transgression. Although they are overtly dys- or para-functional, these phantasmic (幻想的)

objects nevertheless presuppose—albeit in a contradictory sense—the advent of functionality

as the universal moral law of the object, and the advent of this object itself, separated,

autonomous and dedicated to the transparency of its function. When one ponders 

it, there is something unreal and almost surreal in the fact of reducing an object to its

function: and it suffices to push this principle of functionality to the limit to make its

absurdity emerge. This is evident in the case of the toaster, iron or “undiscoverable objects”

of Carelman. (192–193)

Jacques Carelman's Impossible Objects

Catalogue of Extraordinary Objects

philip garner alienature

Heterotopian Gadgets: Para-functionality and Art Objects

異托邦工具

The heterotopia

described by Michel Foucault (1970) illustrates what a literary gadget

might be like:

Utopias afford consolation: although they have no real locality there is nevertheless a fantastic,

untroubled region in which they are able to unfold;... Heterotopias are disturbing, probably because they destroy “syntax” in advance, and not only the syntax which causes words and things (next to and also one another) to “hold together.”

Jean Tinguely useless machine

Whereas artists like Jean Tinguely have constructed

useless machines that comically mirror rationality, Panamarenko’s objects rarely

work (figure 3.11), provoking the viewer to think about the nature of invention

and the desires that motivate it. ...His scientific theories on flight

also highlight the fictional nature of scientific knowledge and blur the boundaries

between words and things.

Panamarenko's Voyage to the Star (1979)

The inventor-artist Steven Pippin meditates on photography. He coats with

photographic chemicals the interior surfaces of everyday objects like washing

machines, toilets, and bath tubs, turning them into cameras. His ingenious experiments

interweave the host object’s original functionality with that of a camera,

resulting in objects that occupy a difficult conceptual space outside the usual

polarization of functionalism and surrealism. They do produce sense, and we

understand them, but it is hard to say what exactly we understand about them.

In a world of artificial objects shaped almost entirely by functionalism, devices

like an Object with Which to See the World in Detail do not attempt to escape the

dictates (支配) of functionalism but instead work from within, extending it to include

the poetic and playfully subversive (figure 3.12).

Although often threatening, Ramette’s objects do not shock. Their critical content

is hidden beneath the poetry of construction and the humorous appreciation

of their function.

Wodiczko’s designs show how simple electronic technologies can challenge

preconceptions, but are at the margins of design. Although I see them as design

proposals not artworks it seems that, to hold a design view where electronic objects

function as criticism, one must move closer to the world of fine art because

the design profession finds it difficult to accommodate such research.

Alien Staff

Hertzian Pathologies: Para-functionality and Electronic Objects

赫茲病理學

Between Rationality and Reality

The most effective examples in this chapter function as test pieces that, through

their marginalization, make visible the barriers limiting poetic experience in

everyday life.

透過邊緣化，將"限制詩意經驗" 的障礙，凸顯出來

Driven by poetry, imagination,

and intuition rather than reason and logic, they have their own rationality,

an alternative to our everyday scientific-industrial rationality.

...This is the role of

the para-functional as criticism.

Within this space lies the bizarre world of the “infra-ordinary,”

the subject of the next chapter

Homework 3: (僅供參考)

Designing Para-functional Objects: (可用 AI 生圖)

誤用，錯用，邊緣化，已有之技術或設計，展現新奇，古怪，詩意之暢想。

(photos of mark-ups)

Project 1: (Deadline 10/27)

Design Proposal based on "Flaneur + GAI"

You can also apply qualities mentioned in Hertzian Tales:

Post-Optimal Object (post-optimal urban), 

para-functionality, 

Eccentric Objects, 

impossible objects,  

poetic and playfully subversive,  

heterotopian objects, 

fiction, 

surrealism, 

humor, 

infra-ordinary, (從「創新科技」轉向「重新感受平凡中的奇異」)

(次平凡的，我們總是關心戲劇性的、重大的事件，卻對每天環繞我們的「平凡背景噪音」視而不見。infra-ordinary 指的是那些太熟悉、太微小，以至於被忽略的事物 —— 但正是它們構成了我們生活的質地。)

user-unfriendliness, 

(in)human-factor

創造詩性、模糊、反常的物件，引發反思

Describe your pilot study, insights, proposal, scenarios, possible challenges, critical reflection. 

Notice: mind the gaps in terms of GAI's trustworthiness biases, and hallucination

Questions: how can we leverage GAI's hallucination to those critical qualities in Hertzian Tales, when designing urban playful experiences?

week 7. (10/13) Workshop sharing

Workshop sharing

Critical reflection to place/GAI experience

 Group presentation and Q/A

week 4. Hertzian Tales (chap 1)

Flaneur Workshop Intro and practice

Introduction:

建築與傢具設計已經成功的在文化沈思的領域運作了一段時間，然而，產品設計與市場的強力連結使得電子產品很少有文化功能上的沈思。

"Whereas architecture and furniture design have successfully operated in the realm of cultural speculation for some time, product design's strong ties to the marketplace have left little room for speculation on the cultural function of electronic products." p. xv

為了達成這個(目的)，研究需要擴展設計美學的概念，以包含更詩意和形上的關係，關連到科技設計物的人造環境。

"In order to achieve this, research is needed into an expanded notion of design aesthetics that includes more poetic and metaphysical relationships with the artificial environment of technological artifact." p. xvi

 Memphis Group

Do hit chair by Droog Design

即使是設計團隊發起的文化與美學的實驗，例如  Memphis，或者更近期的 Droog Design，也很少碰電子產品。

"Even the cultural and aesthetic experiments of design groups like Memphis, or more recently Droog Design, rarely touch on electronics." p. xvi

Mies Chair and Ottoman by Andrea Barnzi et al.

Andrea Barnzi 和其他 1960 年代與 1970 年代的實驗設計師，處理詩意居住模式中的設計物的角色，在建築學觀點的帶領下，發展出挑釁的研究取徑和立場，聚焦於新素材與表面的表達和語言學上的可能性。

"Andrea Branzi and other experimental designers of the 1960s and 1970s addressed the role played by design in poetic modes of inhabitation and, guided by an architectural perspective, developed provocative research approaches and positions focusing on the expressive and linguistic possibilities of new materials and surfaces." p. xvii

根據早期的義大利設計思考，Ezio Manzini 描述了設計師的角色，是提供新鮮的觀點。他認為設計願景的日子已經結束了，對烏托邦的厭倦已經開始了。然而，他建議設計師使用自己的技巧來視覺化另類的未來，呈現在公眾面前.....

"More recently, Ezio Manzini outlined a role for the designer that offers a fresh perspective that builds on earlier Italian design thinking. He suggests that the days of the design visionary are over, and a weariness with utopian vision has set in. Instead, he advises the designer to use his or her skills to visualize alternative future scenarios in ways that can be presented to the public,..." p. xvii

這些"實體物質故事"並不是烏托邦願景或藍圖 - 未來的明確模型太過於說教了。相反的，這些設計混合了批判主義與樂觀主義，提供"複雜的愉悅性"，就像我們在其他有想像力的媒體中找到的，例如電影和文學，特別是那些探索真實與虛構邊界的。

"These "material tales" are not utopian visions or blueprints - clear-cut modeling of the future is too didactic. Instead, they mix criticism with optimism to provide the "complicated pleasure" found in other imaginative media such as film and literature, particularly those that explore boundaries between the real and the unreal." p. xvii

_________________________________________________________________________________


Chapter 1. The Electronic as Post-Optimal Object

radio by Marco Zanuso

電子物件因此在這物質文化世界中佔據一個奇怪的位置，更像洗衣粉和感冒藥，而不像傢具與建築，並且像所有的包裝設計（尤其是符號的）一樣受制於語言學派。電子物件失落在影像與物件之間，它的文化認同是根據技術的功能主義和符號學的關係來定義。

"The electronic object accordingly occupies a strange place in the world of material culture, closer to washing powder and cough mixture than to furniture and architecture, and is subject to the same linguistic discipline as all package design, that of the sign. It is lost somewhere between image and object, and its cultural identity is defined in relation to technological functionalism and semiotics." p. 1

psychology of everyday things by Norman

人因社群非常值得被批判，他們發展出一套電子物件的觀點，主要從電腦科學與認知心理學領域，在電腦工業中極端的有影響力；舉例來說，Don Norman 的設計心理學。

"This is useful to critique the human factors "community," who have developed a view of the electronic object, derived from computer science and cognitive psychology, that is extremely influential in the computer industry; for example, Don Norman's (1988) The Psychology of Everyday Things." p. 2

人因取徑的一個嚴重的問題，是它毫無批判的接受 Bernard Waites 所稱的美國意識形態，或技術在意識上的合法性: 所有問題不管是自然的、人類本能的、或文化的，皆可以視為技術問題，可以透過客觀知識的累積，理性的解決。......如此，技術在美國意識形態中，成為工具理性的化身，技術官僚統治者的工具。

"A serious problem with the human factors approach though, in relation to this project, is its uncritical acceptance of what has been called by Bernard Waites (1989) the "American Ideology," or the ideological legitimation of technology: All problems whether of nature, human nature, or culture, are seen as "technical" problems capable of rational solution through the accumulation of objective knowledge, ..., so that technology, in the American Ideology, becomes "instrumental rationality" incarnate, the tools of technocracy." p. 2 

然而，對物質文化最豐富的反思，並不是來自人類學或社會學，而是來自那些關心日常物件詩意的文學。巴舍拉的空間詩學提供了一種深受心理分析影響的角度，強調粗糙傢具的詩意面向，例如衣櫥與衣櫃。谷崎潤一郎的陰翳禮讚研究日本物件關於陰影和黑暗的面向，以及電在欣賞時所形成的效果。

"However, the most fruitful reflection on material culture is to be found, not in anthropology or sociology, but in literature concerned with the poetry of everyday objects. In The Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelar (1969) offers an analysis, influenced by psychoanalysis, that emphasises the poetic dimension of humble furniture such as wardrobes and chests of drawers; Jun'ichiro Tanizaki's (1991) InPraise of Shadows considers the Japanese object in relation to shadow and darkness, and the effects of electricity on their appreciation;..." p. 5

一旦這些原型要素受制於大量生產所要求的極端理性化過程，它們就被化約成抽象的、極端微小化的電子零件。基於物質的真相，它們的現代主義詩意，已經喪失了。

"But once these prototype elements have been subjected to the extreme rationalization required by mass production, they become reduced to abstract ultra-miniaturized electronic components. Their modernist poetry, based on truth to materials, is lost." p. 7

但一般來說，設計師探索新素材美學面向的努力，並不如工程師探索功能可能性的努力來得多。這領域中大部份的作品並不鼓勵詩意與文化的可能性，結合到實用性與技術性的面向。 結果就是產出一整串毫無想像力的提案。

"But generally, designers have not exploited the aesthetic dimension of new materials with the same energy that engineers have exploited their functional possibilities. Most work in the area does not encourage poetic and cultural possibilities to converge with practical and technical ones. The outcome is a stream of unimaginative proposals." p. 9

marble answer machine by Durrell Bishop

Durrell Bishop 的作品一個可能有意義的視野: 現存物件被當作實體圖像使用，資料的實體物質再現，同時指向被操作資料的實用面向與詩意面向。......雖然很實際的被應用，Bishop的思考與文化脈絡是接合的，而技術在其中被使用。一種"用的美學"湧現了。

"The work of Durrell Bishop offers a vision of what this might mean: existing objects are used as physical icons, material representations of data that refer to both the pragmatic and poetic dimensions of the data being manipulated.... Although applied very practically, Bishop's thinking engages with the cultural context in which the technology is used. An "aesthetics of use" emerges." p. 17

R1 radio by Chia Li-Gu

電子物件設計師最困難挑戰，並不是技術與符號學的功能性，這些表現的優化程度都已經可以達成，而是在其他尚未被充分研究的領域: 形上學、詩學、以及美學。

"The most difficult challenges for designers of electronic objects now lie not in technical and semiotic functionality, where optimal levels of performance are already attainable, but in the realms of metaphysics, poetry, and aesthetics, where little research has been carried out." p. 20

Oracle by Robert Rauschenberg

本書的立場是，設計研究應該為電子物件探索新的角色，促進更詩意的居住模式: 透過概念式產品整合美學經驗與日常生活的一種社會研究形式。在這個實用性與功能性被視為理所當然的世界中，後優化物件的美學能夠提供新的日常生活經驗，新的詩意面向。

"The position of this book is that design research should explore a new role for the electronic object, one that facilitates more poetic modes of habitation: a form of social research to integrate aesthetic experience with everyday life through "conceptual products." In a world where practicality and functionality can be taken for granted, the aesthetics of the post-optimal object could provide new experience of everyday life, new poetic dimensions." p. 20