The Everyday.

Tobias Revell, New Mumbai, 2012.

When people encounter the term critical design for the first time, they often assume it has something to do with critical theory and the Frankfurt School or just plain criticism. But it is neither. We are most interested in critical thinking, that is, not taking things for granted, being skeptical, and by always questioning what is give. All good design is critical. Designers start by identifying shortcomings in the thing they are redesigning and offer a better version. Critical design applies this to larger more complex issues. Critical design is critical thought translated into materiality. It is about thinking through design rather than through words and using the language and structure of design to engage people. It is an expression or manifestation of our skeptical fascination with technology, a way of unpicking the different hopes, fears, promises, delusions, and nightmares of technological development and change, especially how scientific discoveries move from the laboratory into everyday life through the marketplace. The subject can vary. On the most basic level it is about questioning underlying assumptions in design itself, on the next level it is directed at the technology industry and its market-driven limitations, and beyond that, general social theory, politics, and ideology.

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CRITIQUING CRITIQUE

Without an intellectual framework it is very difficult to advance the practice of critical design; lots of projects happen but many simply repeat what has been gone before. We need some criteria that make it possible to advance this form of design through reflection and critique or at least get a sense of how the area can be refined. Conventional design's success is measured against how well it sells and how elegantly conflicts among aesthetics, production, usability, and costs are resolved. How is critical design's success measured?

Design as critique can do many things - pose questions, encourage thought, expose assumptions, provoke action, spark debate, raise awareness, offer new perspectives, and inspire. And even to entertain in an intellectual sort of way. But what is excellence in critical design? Is it subtlety, originality in topic, the handling of a question? Or something more functional such as its impact or its power to make people think? Should it even be measured or evaluated? It's not a science after all and does not claim to be the best or most effective way of raising issues.

Critical design might borrow heavily from art's methods and approaches but that is it. We expect art to be shocking and extreme. Critical design needs to be closer to the everyday; that's where its power to disturb lies. A critical design should be demanding, challenging, and if it is going to raise awareness, do so for issues that are not already well known. Safe ideas will not linger in people's minds or challenge prevailing views but if it is too weird, it will be dismissed as art, and if too normal, it will be effortlessly assimilated. If it is labeled as art it is easier to deal with but if it remains design, it is more disturbing; it suggests that the everyday life as we know it could be different, that things could change.

For us, a key feature is how well it simultaneously sits in this world, the here-and-now, while belonging to another yet-to-exist one. It proposes an alternative that through its lack of fit with this world offers a critique by asking, "why not?" If it sits too comfortably in one or the other it fails. That is why for us, critical designs need to be made physical. Their physical presence can locate them in our world whereas their meaning, emboddied values, beliefs, ethics, dreams, hopes, and fears belong somewhere else. This is where the critique of critical design should focus, on crafting its coexistence in the here-and-now and yet-to-exist, and when done successfully, providing what author Martin Amis has called "complicated pleasure".

COMPASSES NOT MAPS

Using design as a form of critique is just one use for design, as is communication or problem solving. We believe that some design should always question prevailing values and their underlying assumptions and that this activity can sit beside mainstream design rather than replace it. The challenge is to keep evolving techniques that are appropriate to the times and identifying topics that need to be highlighted, reflected on, or challenged.

In Envisioning Real Utopias, Erik Olin Wright describes emancipatory social science "as a theory of a journey from the present to the possible future: the diagnosis and critique of society tells us why we want to leave the world in which we live; the theory of alternatives tells us where we want to go; and the theory of transformation tells us how to get from here to there - how to make viable alternatives achievable".

For us, the fulfillment of this journey is highly unlikely if set out like a blueprint. Instead, we believe to achieve change, it is necessary to unlock people's imaginations and apply it to all areas of life at a microscale. Critical design, by generating alternatives, can help construct compasses rather than maps for navigating new sets of values.

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By acting on peoples' imaginations rather than the material world, critical design aims to challenge how people think about everyday life. In doig this, it strives to keep alive other possibilities by providing a counterpoint to the world around us and encouraging us to see that everyday life could be different.

Anthony Dunne & Fiona Raby, Speculative Everything, MIT Press, 2013, p.35, 43-45.

Normal Design.

n.a., Paris dans 20 ans, 1967 (via NDLR).

But focus on technology as knowledge has ramifications beyond the science-technology question. Hugh Aitken, for example, makes it basic to the historical method adopted in his book The Continuous Wave. To recount the early technical and institutional history of radio, Aitken regards "history of technology as one branch of intellectual history or the history of ideas." From this approach, he explains the origins of the history of inventions crucial to radio by examining "the flows of information that converged at the point and at the time when the new combinations came into existence." As the work of Aitken and other historians makes clear, however, the ideas we deal with are not disembodied - they are, as Layton points out, the ideas of people (and communities of people). Emphasis on knowledge thus brings history of technology into symbiotic relation, not only with intellectual history and philosophy, but with social history and sociology as well. Such emphasis is critical, in particular, for understanding technological change, a fundamental concern in one way or another for all these disciplines. As remarked by Rachel Laudan, "shifts in the knowledge of the practicioners play a crucial role in technological development." People who aspire to understand such development - economists and policy makers, for instance - might do well to focus accordingly when they delve (in Rosenberg's graphic phrase) "inside the black box" of technology. If these ramifications are valid, as I believe they are, laying out the features of engineering knowledge very much needs doing.

In addressing this task, I will structure the inquiry around the goal of design. For engineers, in contrast to scientists, knowledge is not an end in itself or the central objective of their profession. Rather, it is, as illustrated by the quotation from the British engineer, a means to a utilitarian end - actually, several ends. Engineering can, in fact, be defined in terms of these ends, as in the following quotation from another British engineer, C.F.C. Rogers:

Engineering refers to the practice of organizing the design and construction (and, I would add, operation) of any artifice which transforms the physical world around us to meet some recognized need.

Here I take "organize" to be meant in the sense of "bring into being" or "get together" or "arrange". The first end, "design", has to do with the plans from which the artifice is built, as in the many drawings (or computer displays) of an airplane and its components. "Construction" (which I shall call "production") denotes the process by which these plans are translated into the concrete artifice, as in manufacture of the actual airplane. "Operation" deals with the employment of the artifice in meeting the recognized need, the related example being the maintenance and flight operations of the airplanes of an airline. Definitions of engineering sometimes mention other ends such as "development," and "applications" or "sales"; these can usually be subsumed under one of the foregoing three, which will be sufficient for present purposes.

Of the three, design is frequently taken as central. Layton, in treating technology as knowledge, takes it as such (with minor mention of other ends). He adds in a later paper, however, that recent attempts among engineers to "reestablish design as the central theme of engineering" are "not without ideological overtones." Other scholars contend that rhetorical emphasis on design by engineers is primarily an attempt to gain status, that "engineers have seized on design as a way to liken their activity to that of scientists, to assert that they too are engaged in creative activity." Whatever the truth of the situation, I will restrict my focus here almost entirely to design. To attempt more would extend impractically an already lengthy study. Great numbers of engineers do, in fact, engage in design, and it is there that requirements for much engineering knowledge originate in an immediately technical sense. Though extaengineering needs - economic, military, social, or personal - may set the original problem, for many workaday engineers things come into focus at the level of concrete design. My emphasis on design, however, should not be taken to imply anything derogatory about other areas of engineering. For a complete epistemology of engineering, production and operation will require equal attention. For the time being, however, my concern will be limited to engineering design knowledge.

"Design," of course, denotes both the content of a set of plans (as in "the design for a new airplane") and the process by which those plans are produced. In the latter meaning, it typically involves tentative layout (or layouts) of the arrangement and dimensions of the artifice, checking of the candidate device by mathematical analysis or experimental test to see if it does the required job, and modifications when (as commonly happens at first) it does not. Such procedure usually requires several iterations before finally dimensioned plans can be released for production. Events in the doing are also more complicated than such a brief outline suggests. Numerous difficult trade-offs may be required, calling for decisions on the basis of incomplete or uncertain knowledge. If available knowledge is inadequate, special research may have to be undertaken. The process is a complicated and fascinating one that needs more historical analysis than it has received.

Design is important here, however, mainly as it conditions the knowledge required for its performance. Knowledge itself forms the primary focus; while requirements from design must be kept in mind at all times as determining that knowledge, details of how the process takes place are secondary. I have never attempted to design an airplane in my entire career as a research engineer (though I participated in planning and designing large aeronautical research facilities). The atmosphere  in which I worked, however, and the knowledge I helped produce, were conditioned by the needs of airplane designers who visited our laboratory. My colleagues and I were keenly and continuously aware of the practical purposes we served. The situation in this book is somewhat similar. Though only one of the historical studies deals directly with the design process, the needs of design play a determining role throughout. 

To keep matters manageable, I shall further limit attention to what can be called normal design. In The Origins of the Turbojet Revolution, Edward Constant defined "normal technology" - "what technological communities usually do" - as comprising "the improvement of the accepted tradition or its application under 'new or more stringent conditions.'" Normal design (my extension, not Constant's) is then the design involved in such normal technology. The engineer engaged in such design knows at the outset how the device in question works, what are its customary features, and that, if properly designed along such lines, it has good likelihood of accomplishing the desired task. A designer of a normal aircraft engine prior to the turbojet, for example, took it for granted that the engine should be piston driven by a gasoline-fueled, four-stroke, internal-combustion cycle. The arrangement of cylinders for a high-powered engine would also be taken as given (radial if air-cooled and in linear banks if liquid-cooled). So also would other, less obvious features (e.g., tappet as against, say, sleeve valves). The designer was familiar with engines of this sort and knew they had a long tradition of success. The design problem - often highly demanding within its limits - was one of improvement in the direction of decreased weight and fuel consumption or increased power output or both. Normal design is thus very different from radical design, such as that confronting the initiators of the turbojet revolution described by Constant. The protagonists of that revolution had little to take for granted in the way that designers of normal engines could. In radical design, how the device should be arranged or even how it works are largely unknown. The designer has never seen such a device before and has no presumption of success. The problem is to design something that will function well enough to warrant further development.

Though less conspicuous than radical design, normal design makes up by far the bulk of day-to-day engineering enterprise. The vast design offices at firms like Boeing, General Motors, and Bechtel engage mainly in such activity. In the words of one reader of this material, "For every Kelly Johnson (a highly innovative American airplaine designer who will figure in chapter 3) there are thousands of useful and productive engineers designing from combinations of off-the-shelf technologies that are then tested, adjusted, and refined until they work satisfactorily." In addition, knowledge for normal design is more circumscribed and easier to deal with. Though it may entail novelty and invention in considerable degree, it is not crucially identified with originality in the same way as knowledge for radical design. My restriction to normal design thus related to both substance and expedience - there are sufficient matters of importance to confront at this stage without opening the Pandora's box of technical invention.

I do not mean to suggest that normal and radical design, and the knowledge they require, can be sharply separated; there are obviously middle levels of novelty where the distinction is difficult to make. The difference, nevertheless, is sufficiently real to serve as a basis for analysis. I likewise do not mean to suggest that normal design is routine and deductive and essentially static. Like technology as a whole, it is creative and constructive and changes over time as designers pursue ever more ambitious goals. The changes, however, are incremental instead of essential; normal design is evolutionary rather than revolutionary. As we shall see, even within such limits the kinds of knowledge required are enormously diverse and complex. The activities that produce the knowledge, unlike the activity it is intended to support, are also something for from normal and day-to-day. 

W.G. Vincenti, What Engineers Know and How They Know It, Edition : Reprint. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1993, 5-9.

Design Research.

Atelier Bow-Wow, Miyashita Park, Tokyo, Excerpt, 2011.

Atelier Bow-Wow, Nora House, Sendai, Japan, 2006.

Atelier Bow-Wow, Kawanishi Camping Cottage B, 1999.

In the Battle of the Books, which is an English characterization of the long struggle between old and new learning in our culture, design was clearly part of the old learning. It was “paleoteric" - the term that was used to name the old learning. The new sciences, which promised to put all human understanding and activity on a firmer footing, were the new learning. They were “neoteric”, since they addressed new problems in understanding the world and tended to shape the organization of learning around such problems. The new learning was theoretical and oriented towards subject matters, marked off from each other by principles and causes that were, in a sense, in the nature of Being. (...)

What I want to suggest for this conference is that the discovery of design in the twentieth century is more than as mall incremental addition to the tradition of theoretical learning upon which our universities have been based since the Renaissance. True, design and its various branches have entered the universities under this guise, and their practical significance for economic development and the well-being of citizens may help to account for this development in tolerance among those who are committed to the old structure of universities and the old models of research. After all, universities had already found ways to accommodate within their missions the study of Law, Theology and Divinity, and Medicine. However, the discovery of design is more than this.It is a sign, I believe, of a new battle of the books in our time: a new round in the struggle between the old and the new learning in human culture. 

There reason for this new battle is evident. While we do not deny the value and the ongoing benefit of theoretical investigations of subject matters in the sciences and arts, we also recognize that the powerful development of this learning has left us in a deeply troubling situation. We possess great knowledge, but the knowledge is fragmented into so great an array of specializations that we cannot find connections and integrations that serve human beings either in their desire to know and understand the world or in their ability to act knowledgeably and responsibly in practical life.While many problems remain to be solved in the fields that currently characterize the old learning - and we must continue to seek better understanding through research in these areas - there are also new problems that are not well addressed by the old structure of learning and the old models of research. 

It is a great irony that what was once the new learning is now the old learning, and what was the old learning is now the new learning. For I believe that is what has happened to design; it has become the new learning of our time, opening a pathway to the neoteric disciplines that we need if we are to connect and integrate knowledge from many specializations into productive results for individual and social life.To besure, those who practice, study, and investigate design in the contemporary world are themselves divided along paleoteric and neoteric lines. Some see no need for design research, and some see in the problems of design the need for research that is modeled on the natural sciences or the behavioral and social sciences as we have known them in the past and perhaps as they are adjusting to the present.But others see in the problems of design the need for new kinds of research for which there may not be entirely useful models in the past - the possibility of a new kind of knowledge, design knowledge, for which we have no immediate precedents. We face an ongoing debate within our own communityabout the role of tradition and innovation in design thinking. 

Without developing this theme further at the moment, I want to suggest that our discussions of design research hold open the possibility of a core insight regarding a new kind of university that is information today and that will emerge more clearly in the next century.The old, venerable universities will remain withus because they contribute valuable knowledge that must be disseminated through well-educated individuals. But there may be a new kind of university that will also have value. It will be a university that prizes theory but does not disdain practice and does not ignore the distinct problems of, and the need for substantive knowledge about, making or production. Making products - and by “product” I mean a range of phenomena that is very broad, including information, artifacts, activities, services, and policies, as well as systems and environments - is the connective activity that integrates knowledge from many fields for impact on how we live our lives. This new kind of university - and there may be only a few of them in the future - will discover a dynamic balance among theory, practice and production, a balance that we do not now find in the vision of most universities today.

R. Buchanan, “Design Research and the New Learning,” Des. Issues, vol. 17, no. 4, pp. 3–23, Oct. 2001.