Critical Design in Context

The use of design as a critical tool to explore design's potential roles in society and the future has emerged as a trend in HCI and design research, but several questions remain open. How can we explain and teach how criticality can be applied to design? How can we assess, compare and give context to critical designs? How should we understand the relationships among practices that bear affinities to critical design, such as speculative design or critical engineering? We argue that many of these issues would be clarified if the HCI and design research communities had a collection of examples that exemplified not just critical design in general, but also its major genres, styles, historical trends, rhetorics, and other distinctions. As a first step in this direction, we detail our efforts to develop a more systematic vocabulary to talk about critical design. After assembling a small operative corpus from a wider inventory of critical designs, we apply poststructuralist semiotic theory to propose a number of analytic distinctions and concepts that could be used-along with others like them-to more systematically and deliberately construct a canon of exemplars and a more mature conceptual vocabulary for critical design.

Reviewed by: The World as an Architectural Project by Hashim Sarkis et al. Abby Spinak (bio) The World as an Architectural Project By Hashim Sarkis and Roi Salgueiro Barrio, with Gabriel Kozlowski. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2019. Pp. 576. It is nice when the title of a book tells you precisely what it is about, and even better when the book's argument surprises you despite the title. The World as an Architectural Project asks, literally, how architects have viewed the planet as a site and reconceptualized globality through speculative design. By reframing "the world" as a design prompt, the authors de-construct it as a historically situated idea that has changed over time and been harnessed to different politics. They invite readers to "disentangle the conception of globes from the imposition of the global," a dichotomy they name mondialisation (following Jean-Luc Nancy, the ongoing project of world-forming) versus globalization (the hegemonic imposition of homogeneity) (pp. 9, 526). The book can therefore be read both as an archive of the changing relationship between the design professions and "the world," and as an activist call to designers for more pluralistic and less anthropocentric engagements with space. The authors begin by asking: "what does architecture do for the world? And, conversely, what does the world do for architecture?" (p. 7). In answer, they present a catalog of fifty visions from 1882 to 2019, drawing this periodization generally from Giovanni Arrighi's long twentieth century, and specifically from Spanish urban planner Arturo Soria y Mata's proposal of a "linear city" (la ciudad lineal) that would "fill the earth" (p. 21). The catalog goes beyond the usual suspects in the history of design (Geddes, Buckminster Fuller, Le Corbusier) to include more theoretical and narrative explorations of the production of space—for example, the Urban [End Page 1250] Theory Lab's "planetary urbanization" and Rania Ghosn and El Hadi Jazairy's extractivism-focused Geostories (pp. 463, 492–3). The discussion intentionally slips between the literal-tangible and the conceptual-theoretical: for example, showing how the scale of "the world" has inspired new methodologies, as well as how collective imaginaries of globality have shifted. In this capacity, the authors define architecture as akin to "other artistic practices that use documentary procedures, analysis, and fiction in-distinctly to produce visions of social totalities" (p. 7). They invite readers to engage with these projects as situated texts, their world-forming aspirations as artifacts of the evolution and limits of the "architectural imagination" at different historical junctures (p. 527). Commendably, they observe that their catalog reflects "imbalances of class, race, and gender" that have unequally empowered men in the global North to imagine, design, and be heard at the scale of the world—inequalities that "are still pervasive in the profession of architecture" (p. 16). As itself an artifact of mondialisation, this book may be of interest to historians for its attention to architecture as an environmental act. The authors situate their catalog—briefly but incisively—as an intervention for the Anthropocene and conclude with a sense of urgency: "There is no time left and there is no other place to go" (pp. 4, 521). Given recent attention to the origins and periodization of the Anthropocene (and its many etymological alternatives), historians may find the book's optimism intriguing as a field-specific appropriation of Anthropocenic narrative. "Architects reject the closure of the future," Sarkis writes in the epilogue, and are therefore committed to "a necessity to heal the world starting from little architectural acts up" (pp. 522–3). The catalog can thus also be read as a politics of methodological experimentation with alternative "geo-visualizations" (pluralistic, non-anthropocentric). In this framing, the book intersects with other recent calls to reimagine architecture as a field in the face of climate change—including Elisa Iturbe's critiques of "carbon form" as a violent spatial logic that is sufficiently entrenched to endure beyond decarbonization; Charlotte Malterre-Barthes's "A Global Moratorium on New Construction" initiative, which calls for a reorientation of architecture towards reuse and redistribution; and Damian White's critical material design politics for a democratic Anthropocene—all of whom ask what the tacit assumptions of mainstream...

The purpose of this study is to develop 3D dynamic fashion garments with changeable styles, colors and textile patterns, especially using a 3D virtual simulation system, and to examine their potential possibilities in online fashion platforms. For designing and developing 3D dynamic fashion garments, CLO3D and Aftereffects were used with a design collaboration between a fashion designer and a motion graphic artist group. Ten samples of a ready-to-wear collection were developed to visualize aesthetic and technological explorations of 3D dynamic fashion garments, composed of short videos. This study also evaluated the potential of 3D dynamic fashion garments along with 3D virtual simulation systems through focus group interview with professional fashion designers and digital experts, which indicated social and industrial possibilities toward them. This survey showed a list of findings in terms of current status of 3D virtual simulation systems and their impact on companies, discourses on the uncanny valley surrounding avatars, changes in fashion design process derived from 3D virtual simulation systems, co-design and customization in online platforms, and future prospects of 3D virtual garments in the fashion and gaming industries. Finally, this study led to discussions on future possible digital fashion design with several implications, based on design criteria, including digital technology, dynamic range, wearability, expressivity, interactivity, sustainability, and context.

This article discusses the mobilization of the nation for fashion, based on how the relationship between fashion and nation unfolds in the case of fashion design practice and the fashion industry in Denmark. The otherwise globalized fashion industry is equally involved in what I term “catwalking the nation,” both as a way to construct a cosmopolitan nationalist discourse for the post-industrial nation and as a strategy for local fashion industries to promote collective identity in order to strengthen potential market share, which is the focus of this article. What may at first appear in the Danish case as an absurd and non-productive relationship is actually significant, I would argue, despite its complexity. It has the potential to stimulate critical fashion design practice and give fashion designers a voice, allowing them to take an active part in contemporary public debates on important issues such as nationalism and cosmopolitanism in the age of globalization.

A high-level review was conducted of design criteria in the United States for major components of the built environment for selected design and construction codes, reference standards, and best practices. The intent of the review is to gauge the expected performance of current building and infrastructure design from a community resilience perspective for natural hazard events. Design criteria that support community resilience were evaluated, including design hazard characterization, expected performance, recovery of function, interdependency issues, and emerging methods. The impact of changing environmental conditions on infrastructure design and performance was also examined, and areas needing improvement are identified. The review focused on design criteria related to flood, wind, and seismic hazards. Likewise, the systems of the built environment reviewed include buildings, water and wastewater systems, electrical power systems, and transportation systems. Although community resilience depends on the performance of existing buildings and infrastructure, this report focuses on design criteria for new construction to inform future codes, standards, regulations, and best practices. Technical topics to improve the performance and recovery of the built environment for a range of hazard types and to advance the methods and tools available to support resilient systems and communities for stakeholders are identified. The target audience of this report includes industry associations, design professionals, community building code officials, community and city planners, and researchers.

The Illegal Town Plan aims to understand and develop community- based futures for economic and social development. This case study describes and analyses an ongoing practice-based research project that began in 2015. The project, ambitious in its scope, has engaged with communities that have been stripped of power to develop and present new visions of their hometown. Located in Rhyl, North Wales, the design team has developed strategies, ideas, and possibilities with the people who rejected a European future. This project proposes a form of economic, architectural, and design speculation that aims to reimagine regeneration in a post-BREXIT Britain. The case study questions how we, as designers, evolve and develop processes and practices, popularised through the evolution of Critical and Speculative Design (CSD), to think through alternative social, political, and economic futures. The project utilises open, interdisciplinary, and diverse dialogues with the intention of building a heightened notion of engagement and agency. We hope to demonstrate practices that allow speculation to become democratised away from the gallery and into the world. Through conversation with two politicians, the authors were confronted by a growing realisation that there was a deep problem at the heart of regional development. There was a gap, a schism, between the community and those tasked with the future of their economic prosperity. For the last four years, we’ve been trying to support the people of Rhyl to bridge this gap. As a form of participatory speculation, this project aims to build a new language and discourse of speculation in which underrepresented voices become key to the ambitions of a small town and where the outlier is valued for opening alternatives. There have been many criticisms of critical and speculative design approaches in recent years. This project builds on nearly two decades of CSD experience (in both research and education) to imagine the evolution of the approach. Through a process of anecdotalisation, this case study gives four semi-fictional accounts of extraordinary moments that aim to give insight into the unseen process of an experimental design practice.

A comprehensive understanding of the needs of the user is required to design adequate workplace systems in general, but especially in the highly digitised area of industry where operators are interacting with autonomously operating machines. There is little knowledge in design criteria for professionals to enable adequate developments of system design for Human-Machine Interaction, e.g. Human-Robot Collaboration regarding the effects of design decisions to all three levels of Human Factors, i.e. physiological, cognitive and organisational limitations. Moreover, there is little known about objective measurement procedures that evaluate whether the operator subjectively perceives the workplace system design as assistance and improvement. The research presented in the following is affiliated with the scientific discipline of Human Factors Engineering and focuses on the evaluation of Human Factor issues within the digitised industry. Based on broad theoretical and empirical investigations, the results of this research extend our knowledge of adequate Human-Centred Design by providing reliable, powerful design criteria for workplaces where operators interact with machines/collaborate with robots, but also an overall technique, the Objective Workload Detection Method, for evaluation of the effectiveness of design investigation focusing on cognitive stress relief. Through the application of this method within a controlled experiment, the validation of the derived design criteria was confirmed. The study significantly shows how the cognitive workload can be relieved by an assisting environment. This work also gives one best-practice design example of a self-adapting workplace system for hybrid Human-Robot Teams. Following the Human-Centred Design method, the concept of Assisting Industrial Workplace System for Human-Robot Collaboration has been successfully developed as a flexible hybrid unit design. The prototype is related to a real-world scenario from the aerospace industry and the demonstrator was implemented within a laboratory set-up. This work seamlessly applies techniques from interdisciplinary science fields, e.g. Engineering, Neuroscience, Gestalt theory, and Design. Equally, the design criteria and the evaluation method will support professionals from varied disciplines to succeed in the creation process of future system-designs by giving a clear indication of future Human-Centred Design research.

Critical and Speculative Design Practice and Semiotics:

Recent speculative and critical design practices may critique the dominant socio-cultural assumptions of technologies, but often lack diversity and participatory input outside the privileged realm of academic and professional designers. This paper investigates the process and potential of designing speculative futures with local communities, in order to collectively imagine technology that serves a common good and reinforces local identity. This study reflects on the "Sankofa City" project, a three-month community-university collaboration based in a historically black neighborhood in South Los Angeles. The project utilized design fiction scenario videos and collages to present provocative design concepts to local stakeholder meetings and the general public. This paper analyzes the methodology and outcomes of co-designing emerging technologies (such as augmented reality and self-driving cars) in order to establish "infrastructures of the imagination" for long-term strategies and alternative cultural models of innovation.

How does one go about designing a human? With the rise in recent years of virtual humans this is no longer purely a philosophical question. Virtual humans are intelligent agents with a body, often a human-like graphical body, that interact verbally and non-verbally with human users on a variety of tasks and applications. Our working group approached this question from the perspective of interactivity. Specifically, how can one design effective interactive experiences involving a virtual human, and what constraints does this goal place on the form and function of an embodied conversational agent. Our group grappled with several related questions: What ideals should designers aspire to, what sources of theory and data will best lead to this goal and what methodologies can inform and validate the design process? A longer article (.pdf) summarizes the output of this WG and suggests a specific framework, borrowed from interactive media design, as a vehicle for advancing the state of interactive experiences with virtual humans.

This paper features an edited conversation with designers Ralph Ball and Maxine Naylor. It explores their thinking in relation to critical design. In 1985 Ralph Ball formed a design partnership with Maxine Naylor a reputable experimental designer maker. Together they began to challenge the boarders between art, craft and design. They have exhibited work internationally and held teaching positions at colleges in the UK and USA. Over a decade from 1985 Ball taught on Furniture, Jewellery and Industrial Design at the Royal College of Art, where Naylor taught on Furniture Design, directing the course between 1995 and 1998. Today Ball is Professor of Design at Central Saint Martins University of the Arts London and Naylor Professor of Design and Director of the Design Research Institute University of Brighton. Through practice and academic tenure they have refined their critical perspectives and developed a distinctive approach to practice based research. They describe themselves as critical designers using design as a critical, visual discourse to communicate ideas about design culture and society. Taking experimentation as a research method they subject their ideas to a critical process of refutation; questioning the work through an approach that challenges protocols of design method aiming to enhance the design profession. In this conversation the designers’ discuss their concepts of ‘open-process’ and ‘design poetics’. They describe their role acting as critics of design from within design practice. They outline their thoughts on the increasingly un-ideological culture of Industrial Design describing how through playful experiment they question the value of repetition in design and mass production of products. They do this by taking modernist axioms to extremes and ‘embedding narrative’ into objects as commentary on the state of contemporary design. Supplementing the conversation the author offers his reflections. Primarily this exposes a form of critical design that differs significantly from popular and often technologically orientated notions of critical design.

The life and death of critical and speculative design: post-disciplinarity, post-truth, post-self and post-capital

A number of studies have been carried out in past years on optimum design under the condition of probabilistic constraints. For example, Switzky derived a probabilistic optimality criterion for the structural design with stress constraints. However, few attempts have been made to formulate the probabilistic optimality criterion for the displacement constraint. In the present study, an attempt was made first to derive the probabilistic optimality displacement criterion for the minimum weight design by using the Lagrange multiplier method. Then, a new probabilistic optimality criteria method was proposed, which unifies Switzky's probabilistic optimality stress criterion and the present probabilistic optimality displacement criterion by using the envelope method. Two design examples were presented to demonstrate the efficiency and convergency of the method developed herein.The results shows that the proposed method can be used to optimize the structure having probabilistic stress and displacement constraints only in few cycles of trials, and hence it has a good convergency in comparison with other probabilistic optimum design methods using mathematical programming.

This paper introduces and reflects on a master elective course for Interaction Design students titled Researching the Future Everyday. Aiming to equip students with the skills to critically adapt their own practices to the changing societal roles of design, the course guides students through a critical design approach with three key elements: a Science and Technology Studies paper that provides an alternative paradigm for assumed relations between design and societal issues, a Critical Design approach that makes the paradigm relatable for designers, and the use of Research Products to stimulate generalization of design implications beyond the exemplar. By analyzing ten student projects, we identify two patterns of using critical design to extend and enrich alternative paradigms. One uses oppositional designs to develop alternative design approaches. The other uses accelerational designs to extend alternative problem spaces. These patterns and their variations reveal avenues to further support students in developing critical practices.

240 Children, Youth and Environments Vol. 20 No. 2 (Fall 2010) ISSN: 1546-2250 Linking Architecture and Education: Sustainable Design for Learning Environments Taylor, Anne (2009). Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press; 451 pages. $100. ISBN 9780826334077. In Linking Architecture and Education, Anne Taylor has compiled a career of research into an extensive resource for architects, administrators, educators, and anyone else involved in the design of learning environments. Dr. Taylor founded and served as director of the Institute for Environmental Education in the School of Architecture and Planning at the University of New Mexico, where she directed research that examined the effects of the built environment on children. In this book she advocates for a series of design principles developed through years of teaching, research, and professional consultancy on the design of learning environments. The book places primary emphasis on the design of schools and schoolyards, with consideration also given to informal learning spaces such as museums and playgrounds. Aimed at providing a common language for design professionals and educators, Taylorattempts to link educational goals and learning theories to design principles through the use of numerous charts and graphics woven throughout the volume. The book is loosely organized around five key themes: philosophical foundations, organizational strategies, the building as a teaching tool or “threedimensional textbook,” future trends, and fostering ecological stewardship. The first four themes serve as the topics for the book sections, providing a sequential organization and unifying structure to the extensive literature. Stewardship is addressed in four separate chapters—one for each section of the book. The organization of the book is driven by Taylor’s aspirations to transform the educational built environment through a series of holistic-design guidelines including: design criteria that is informed by the users’ developmental needs; architectural form that evolves from curriculum and learning theory; educational spaces that are 241 flexible and modeled after the design studio; learning landscapes; community engagement through co-location, multi-use design, and the community as living laboratory; and post-occupancy user guides and evaluation. Along the way she incorporates supplemental information in the form of case studies, photographs, charts, and visual and verbal commentary from colleagues. These are organized in a brilliantly colored and graphically coded format of sidebar information, design tools, designer perspectives, and stewardship forums. At times this rich array of resources and varied perspectives disrupts the flow of the book—obscuring the points presented instead of punctuating them. But, perhaps more significantly, they also create the possibility for an alternative, nonlinear, reading of the book. Students, design and education professionals, parents, and community members may find this secondary organization helpful in using the text as a sourcebook of examples and best practices both to inform the design of new learning spaces as well as to identify opportunities to make more effective use of existing spaces. The link between pedagogy and architectural design is made clear throughout the book, with related concepts often introduced through charts and diagrams and further reinforced by case examples. In section one, for example,Taylor links philosophical theories to the roles of the learner and teacher, the curriculum, and instructional strategies. She also links these theories to the role of the architect, the design process, and the form of the physical environment. A case study of Reggio Emilia preschools inItaly then demonstrates how aspects of the building design can support the educational philosophy of the school. Stakeholders in design processes may benefit from understanding how philosophy informs practice, and Taylorjustifies combining this information into a single chart as a starting point for design discussion between disciplines. Often such diagrams in the book successfully illustrate key relationships between architecture and education, but at times the format is problematic. For example, the chart could easily be misinterpreted by the reader as a prescription for a particular design process or architectural style based on the educational philosophy of the client. In general, however, Taylor successfully relates educational and architectural concepts in clear and meaningful 242 ways. Design students and practitioners may appreciate the succinct overview of major educational theories in section two, whereas educators may find section three particularly useful for the long list of suggestions about how to use the educational facility...