Discursive Design

Discursive Design
Author: Bruce M. Tharp
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 641
Release: 2019-02-12
Genre: Design
ISBN: 0262038986
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Exploring how design can be used for good—prompting self-reflection, igniting the imagination, and affecting positive social change. Good design provides solutions to problems. It improves our buildings, medical equipment, clothing, and kitchen utensils, among other objects. But what if design could also improve societal problems by prompting positive ideological change? In this book, Bruce and Stephanie Tharp survey recent critical design practices and propose a new, more inclusive field of socially minded practice: discursive design. While many consider good design to be unobtrusive, intuitive, invisible, and undemanding intellectually, discursive design instead targets the intellect, prompting self-reflection and igniting the imagination. Discursive design (derived from “discourse”) expands the boundaries of how we can use design—how objects are, in effect, good(s) for thinking. Discursive Design invites us to see objects in a new light, to understand more than their basic form and utility. Beyond the different foci of critical design, speculative design, design fiction, interrogative design, and adversarial design, Bruce and Stephanie Tharp establish a more comprehensive, unifying vision as well as innovative methods. They not only offer social criticism but also explore how objects can, for example, be used by counselors in therapy sessions, by town councils to facilitate a pre-vote discussions, by activists seeking engagement, and by institutions and industry to better understand the values, beliefs, and attitudes of those whom they serve. Discursive design sparks new ways of thinking, and it is only through new thinking that our sociocultural futures can change.

Critical Design in Context

Critical Design in Context
Author: Matt Malpass
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 169
Release: 2017-02-23
Genre: Design
ISBN: 1472575199
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Critical Design is becoming an increasingly influential discipline, affecting policy and practice in a range of fields. Matt Malpass's book is the first to introduce critical design as a field, providing a history of the discipline, outlining its key influences, theories and approaches, and explaining how critical design can work in practice through a range of contemporary examples. Critical Design moves away from traditional approaches that limit design's role to the production of profitable objects, focusing instead on a practice that is interrogative, discursive and experimental. Using a wide range of examples from contemporary practice, and drawing on interviews with key practitioners, Matt Malpass provides an introduction to critical design practice and a manifesto for how a radical and unorthodox practice might provide design answers in an age of austerity and ecological crisis.

Critical Theory and Interaction Design

Critical Theory and Interaction Design
Author: Jeffrey Bardzell
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 840
Release: 2018-12-04
Genre: Computers
ISBN: 026203798X
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Classic texts by thinkers from Althusser to Žižek alongside essays by leaders in interaction design and HCI show the relevance of critical theory to interaction design. Why should interaction designers read critical theory? Critical theory is proving unexpectedly relevant to media and technology studies. The editors of this volume argue that reading critical theory—understood in the broadest sense, including but not limited to the Frankfurt School—can help designers do what they want to do; can teach wisdom itself; can provoke; and can introduce new ways of seeing. They illustrate their argument by presenting classic texts by thinkers in critical theory from Althusser to Žižek alongside essays in which leaders in interaction design and HCI describe the influence of the text on their work. For example, one contributor considers the relevance Umberto Eco's “Openness, Information, Communication” to digital content; another reads Walter Benjamin's “The Author as Producer” in terms of interface designers; and another reflects on the implications of Judith Butler's Gender Trouble for interaction design. The editors offer a substantive introduction that traces the various strands of critical theory. Taken together, the essays show how critical theory and interaction design can inform each other, and how interaction design, drawing on critical theory, might contribute to our deepest needs for connection, competency, self-esteem, and wellbeing. Contributors Jeffrey Bardzell, Shaowen Bardzell, Olav W. Bertelsen, Alan F. Blackwell, Mark Blythe, Kirsten Boehner, John Bowers, Gilbert Cockton, Carl DiSalvo, Paul Dourish, Melanie Feinberg, Beki Grinter, Hrönn Brynjarsdóttir Holmer, Jofish Kaye, Ann Light, John McCarthy, Søren Bro Pold, Phoebe Sengers, Erik Stolterman, Kaiton Williams., Peter Wright Classic texts Louis Althusser, Aristotle, Roland Barthes, Seyla Benhabib, Walter Benjamin, Judith Butler, Arthur Danto, Terry Eagleton, Umberto Eco, Michel Foucault, Wolfgang Iser, Alan Kaprow, Søren Kierkegaard, Bruno Latour, Herbert Marcuse, Edward Said, James C. Scott, Slavoj Žižek

Hertzian Tales

Hertzian Tales
Author: Anthony Dunne
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 193
Release: 2008-09-26
Genre: Art
ISBN: 0262541998
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How design can improve the quality of our everyday lives by engaging the invisible electromagnetic environment in which we live. As our everyday social and cultural experiences are increasingly mediated by electronic products—from "intelligent" toasters to iPods—it is the design of these products that shapes our experience of the "electrosphere" in which we live. Designers of electronic products, writes Anthony Dunne in Hertzian Tales, must begin to think more broadly about the aesthetic role of electronic products in everyday life. Industrial design has the potential to enrich our daily lives—to improve the quality of our relationship to the artificial environment of technology, and even, argues Dunne, to be subverted for socially beneficial ends. The cultural speculations and conceptual design proposals in Hertzian Tales are not utopian visions or blueprints; instead, they embody a critique of present-day practices, "mixing criticism with optimism." Six essays explore design approaches for developing the aesthetic potential of electronic products outside a commercial context—considering such topics as the post-optimal object and the aesthetics of user-unfriendliness—and five proposals offer commentary in the form of objects, videos, and images. These include "Electroclimates," animations on an LCD screen that register changes in radio frequency; "When Objects Dream...," consumer products that "dream" in electromagnetic waves; "Thief of Affection," which steals radio signals from cardiac pacemakers; "Tuneable Cities," which uses the car as it drives through overlapping radio environments as an interface of hertzian and physical space; and the "Faraday Chair: Negative Radio," enclosed in a transparent but radio-opaque shield. Very little has changed in the world of design since Hertzian Tales was first published by the Royal College of Art in 1999, writes Dunne in his preface to this MIT Press edition: "Design is not engaging with the social, cultural, and ethical implications of the technologies it makes so sexy and consumable." His project and proposals challenge it to do so.

Solving Critical Design Problems

Solving Critical Design Problems
Author: Tania Allen
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 371
Release: 2019-06-06
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 0429677413
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Solving Critical Design Problems demonstrates both how design is increasingly used to solve large, complex, modern-day problems and, as a result, how the role of the designer continues to develop in response. With 13 case studies from various fields, including program and product design, Tania Allen shows how types of design thinking, such as systems thinking, metaphorical thinking, and empathy, can be used together with methods, such as brainstorming, design fiction, and prototyping. This book helps you find ways out of your design problems by giving you other ways to look at your ideas, so that your designs make sense in their setting. Solving Critical Design Problems encourages a design approach that challenges assumptions and allows designers to take on a more critical and creative role. With over 100 images, this book will appeal to students in design studios, industrial and product design, as well as landscape and urban design.

Critical Fabulations

Critical Fabulations
Author: Daniela K Rosner
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 213
Release: 2020-12-29
Genre: Design
ISBN: 0262542684
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A proposal to redefine design in a way that not only challenges the field's dominant paradigms but also changes the practice of design itself. In Critical Fabulations, Daniela Rosner proposes redefining design as investigative and activist, personal and culturally situated, responsive and responsible. Challenging the field's dominant paradigms and reinterpreting its history, Rosner wants to change the way we historicize the practice, reworking it from the inside. Focusing on the development of computational systems, she takes on powerful narratives of innovation and technology shaped by the professional expertise that has become integral to the field's mounting status within the new industrial economy. To do so, she intervenes in legacies of design, expanding what is considered "design" to include long-silenced narratives of practice, and enhancing existing design methodologies based on these rediscovered inheritances. Drawing on discourses of feminist technoscience, she examines craftwork's contributions to computing innovation--how craftwork becomes hardware manufacturing, and how hardware manufacturing becomes craftwork.

Critical Play

Critical Play
Author: Mary Flanagan
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 363
Release: 2013-02-08
Genre: Computers
ISBN: 0262518651
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An examination of subversive games like The Sims—games designed for political, aesthetic, and social critique. For many players, games are entertainment, diversion, relaxation, fantasy. But what if certain games were something more than this, providing not only outlets for entertainment but a means for creative expression, instruments for conceptual thinking, or tools for social change? In Critical Play, artist and game designer Mary Flanagan examines alternative games—games that challenge the accepted norms embedded within the gaming industry—and argues that games designed by artists and activists are reshaping everyday game culture. Flanagan provides a lively historical context for critical play through twentieth-century art movements, connecting subversive game design to subversive art: her examples of “playing house” include Dadaist puppet shows and The Sims. She looks at artists’ alternative computer-based games and explores games for change, considering the way activist concerns—including worldwide poverty and AIDS—can be incorporated into game design. Arguing that this kind of conscious practice—which now constitutes the avant-garde of the computer game medium—can inspire new working methods for designers, Flanagan offers a model for designing that will encourage the subversion of popular gaming tropes through new styles of game making, and proposes a theory of alternate game design that focuses on the reworking of contemporary popular game practices.

Critical Design in Japan

Critical Design in Japan
Author: Ory Bartal
Publisher:
Total Pages: 256
Release: 2020-02-28
Genre:
ISBN: 9781526139979
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This book tells the story of critical avant-garde design in Japan, which emerged during the 1960s and continues to inspire designers today. The practice communicates a form of visual and material protest drawing on the ideologies and critical theories of the 1960s and 1970s, notably feminism, body politics, the politics of identity, and ecological, anti-consumerist and anti-institutional critiques, as well as the concept of otherness. It also presents an encounter between two seemingly contradictory concepts: luxury and the avant-garde. The book challenges the definition of design as the production of unnecessary decorative and conceptual objects, and the characterisation of Japanese design in particular as beautiful, sublime or a product of 'Japanese culture'. In doing so it reveals the ways in which material and visual culture serve to voice protest and formulate a social critique.

Critical Studies in Art and Design Education

Critical Studies in Art and Design Education
Author: Richard Hickman
Publisher: Intellect (UK)
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2010-04
Genre: Art
ISBN: 9781841502052
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This book reviews past practice and theory in critical studies and discusses various trends; some papers keenly advocate a re-conceptualisation of the whole subject area, while others describe aspects of current and past practice which exemplify the "symbiotic" relationship between practical studio work and critical engagement with visual form. Rod Taylor, who has done much to promote and develop critical studies in the UK, provides us with examples of classroom practice and gives us his more recent thoughts on fundamental issues "universal themes" in art and gives examples of how both primary and secondary schools might develop their teaching of art through attending to themes such as "identity," "myth," and "environments" to help "re-animate the practical curriculum." Although some of the discussion in this book centres on or arises from the English National curriculum, the issues are more global, and relevant to anyone involved in developing or delivering art curricula in schools. An American perspective is given in papers by George Geahigan and Paul Duncum. Geahigan outlines an approach to teaching about visual form which begins with students' personal responses and is developed through structured instruction. In Duncum s vision of visual culture art education sites such as theme parks and shopping malls are the focus of students' critical attention in schools; Nick Stanley gives a lucid account of just such an enterprise, giving practical examples of ways to engage students with this particular form of visual pleasure. This publication serves to highlight some of the more pressing issues of concern to art and design teachers in two aspects. Firstly it seeks to contextualise the development of critical studies, discussing its place in the general curriculum possibly as a discrete subject and secondly it examines different approaches to its teaching."

Looking Closer 2

Looking Closer 2
Author: Michael Bierut
Publisher: Allworth
Total Pages: 0
Release: 1997-04-01
Genre: Design
ISBN: 9781880559567
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Looking Closer 2 offers more of the best recent writing on graphic design, covering new and important issues in design language, education, intellectual property, new media, the state of the business, and the place of design in society. The collection presents a stimulating look at how design issues are affected by and affecting changes in contemporary culture. Allworth Press, an imprint of Skyhorse Publishing, publishes a broad range of books on the visual and performing arts, with emphasis on the business of art. Our titles cover subjects such as graphic design, theater, branding, fine art, photography, interior design, writing, acting, film, how to start careers, business and legal forms, business practices, and more. While we don't aspire to publish a New York Times bestseller or a national bestseller, we are deeply committed to quality books that help creative professionals succeed and thrive. We often publish in areas overlooked by other publishers and welcome the author whose expertise can help our audience of readers.