Overview
Critical design makes plausible but unsettling objects, films, and scenarios that expose what products and technologies assume about the people who use them. It defines itself against affirmative design, which reinforces the market's values by making things desirable and easy. Set out in the late 1990s (Dunne, 1999; Dunne and Raby, 2001), the position spread through a decade of studio teaching and museum shows and has been criticised since 2014 for the narrow range of futures it pictured.Examples
- Placebo Project (Dunne & Raby, 2001): eight furniture objects that made household electromagnetic fields perceptible
- Technological Dreams Series: No. 1, Robots (Dunne & Raby, 2007): four domestic robots with nervous or needy personalities
- Designs for an Overpopulated Planet: Foragers (Dunne & Raby, 2009): external digestive organs for a food-scarce future
- Carnivorous Domestic Entertainment Robots (Auger-Loizeau, 2009): a coffee table powered by the flies it traps
- Homeless Vehicle (Krzysztof Wodiczko, 1988 to 1989): a working cart for homeless New Yorkers, and a precedent
Origins
Electronic products are designed to be transparent and frictionless, and the friction they remove often conceals their social effects: the radio spectrum a house sits inside, the data a device gives off, the behaviour a default assumes. In response, the founding text proposes the post-optimal object: functional enough to be taken seriously, strange enough to make its user think (Hertzian Tales, 1999). The position was formalised as a contrast. Affirmative design reinforces how things are; critical design asks how they could be otherwise (Design Noir, 2001). The A/B manifesto (2009) reduced this to two columns: A provides answers, designs for production, serves industry, addresses a consumer, and makes us buy; B asks questions, designs for debate, serves society, addresses a citizen, and makes us think. Speculative Everything (2013) renamed the practice speculative design. The practice spread through studio briefs rather than texts: a decade of student projects, then Design and the Elastic Mind (MoMA, 2008), which hung speculative prototypes beside scientific instruments so that a museum audience could not tell which were real. Within a decade the practice had moved from a doctoral thesis to a teaching department and into museums.
Key Works and Methods
The work is best understood through the objects, most of which pass for product prototypes until their premise is examined.
Objects That Ask Questions
The Placebo Project (2001) placed eight pieces of MDF furniture in volunteers' homes for a month (Dunne & Raby). The Compass Table held 25 compasses that twitched when a laptop was set on it; the GPS Table showed its coordinates when it could see satellites and otherwise displayed the word LOST. Interviews afterwards turned the artefact into an instrument for collecting stories about an invisible environment. Technological Dreams Series: No. 1, Robots (2007) gave four domestic robots inconvenient personalities, one nervous and needing reassurance, one operable only by sustained eye contact. Designs for an Overpopulated Planet: Foragers (2009) proposed external digestive organs modelled on ruminants and birds so that humans could eat urban weeds. Carnivorous Domestic Entertainment Robots (Auger-Loizeau, 2009) added a coffee table that traps flies and digests them in a microbial fuel cell to power its own clock. None of the objects were for sale, and all were photographed as if they were.
Tactics
Several methods recur. The finish is high so the fiction is credible. The strangeness comes from displacing one assumption rather than from open fantasy. The work is shown in the codes of product photography and film rather than those of the gallery, and the measure of success is argument rather than sales. A related move is the value fiction: a scenario in which the technology is realistic and the values of the people using it are not (Dunne and Raby, 2001). The tactic has since been absorbed into design research generally, where a prototype is built to provoke a response rather than to test a task.
Lineage
The nearest ancestor is Italian Radical Design of the late 1960s, which made objects that refused to work as products. Continuous Monument (Superstudio, 1969) ran one gridded building across the planet; No-Stop City (Archizoom, 1969) extended the supermarket into an endless interior. Both drew the logic of consumer modernism out to absurdity, and anti-design furniture through to Memphis (1981) treated laminate and colour as commentary on taste. The principle carried forward is that a design proposal can function as an argument. A second source is interrogative design, in which a working device is built to make a condition impossible to ignore. The Homeless Vehicle (1988 to 1989) was a cart for collecting cans, sleeping, and washing, tested on the streets of New York, and its usefulness drew attention to the condition it addressed (Wodiczko). Design fiction, named in Shaping Things (Sterling, 2005) and defined as prototypes that behave as props from imagined worlds (Bleecker, 2009), shares the method and extends it to whole settings. The theory came after the objects. Criteria for what counts as critical, borrowed from critical theory and literary criticism, arrived only in 2013 (Bardzell and Bardzell). Adversarial design tied the practice to agonistic political theory, in which a designed thing's job is to keep disagreement visible (DiSalvo, 2012); research through design treated critical objects as instruments of enquiry (Mazé and Redström, 2007); and a full history followed (Malpass, 2017). By then the practice had a recognised body of work, which also made it possible to criticise.
Critiques and Legacy
By 2014 critical design had become a recognised genre, and it began to attract sustained criticism.
Critiques
The most cited objection held that the practice reflected the concerns of privileged, largely white European designers, that its dystopias were already daily life for much of the world, and that it mistook its own milieu for the public (Prado and Oliveira, 2014). A second asked what, exactly, critical design was critical of (Tonkinwise, 2015). Others observed that the gallery finish made the work easy to consume as luxury fiction, and that refusing to propose solutions could substitute for political engagement. Decolonial and feminist critiques from 2016 onward pushed for speculation grounded in particular communities rather than in a generic future.
Legacy
The vocabulary has spread further than the practice. Speculative design now covers most speculative futures work in studios, universities, and public agencies. Design fiction shares the methods but builds worlds and props rather than single critical objects. Adversarial design and the speculative computing of the digital humanities are cousins, and solarpunk can be read as a reply to the charge that critical design only knew how to picture dystopia. The practice has moved from the gallery to the workshop: the critical object is now more often a prop in a session with a community or a council than a photograph on a white wall, and its question is put to a named audience rather than a general one. The lasting contribution is the method: a designed object can function as an argument. The open question, raised by its critics, is how a practice that makes futures tangible decides whose futures to show.