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Critical Design and Design Thinking vs. critical design and design thinking
Published in Yvonne Eriksson, Different Perspectives in Design Thinking, 2022
Critical Design is a term coined by Anthony Dunne in his book ‘Hertzian tales: Electronic products, aesthetic experience, and critical design’, first published in 1999 by the Royal College of Art and later as an MIT Press book (2005). The term was later picked up by others, but its adoption is limited. Critical Design is hard to define: In their oft-cited manifesto of 2007 Dunne and Raby say, “it is more of an attitude than anything else, a position rather than a method”, a stance that is also maintained byJacobsone (2017,2019). However, Critical Design had also been defined as “research through design methodology” byBardzell and Bardzell (2013). Dunne and Rabby (2007) explain Critical Design by saying what it is not: “Its opposite is affirmative design: design that reinforces the status quo.” Critical Design, then, is design that challenges the status quo, defies narrow assumptions, values, and preconceptions; it aspires to innovate by proposing designs that are critical of prevailing social norms, disregard current technological limitations, and offer a fresh look on what is possible or acceptable. The goal is “mainly to make us think. But also raising awareness, exposing assumptions, provoking action, sparking debate...” (Dunne and Raby, 2007).
Dilemma-thinking as a means to enhance criticality in design for wellbeing
Published in Ann Petermans, Rebecca Cain, Design for Wellbeing, 2019
Critical design, a term originally coined by Dunne and Raby (2013), emphasises a distinction between ‘affirmative’ design practices that reinforce the status quo defined by global capitalism and ‘critical’ design practices that subvert this status quo. The main intention of critical design is to examine and critique design through design, i.e., to critique market thinking that dominates existing design practices through hypothetical design concepts that embody this critique. This is a noble and valuable intention that can be expanded upon in a number of ways.
Design Research
Published in Miguel Ángel Herrera Batista, The Ontology of Design Research, 2020
‘Critical design’ tries to sensitize people and raise awareness about social, ecological, or other problems and generate changes. In the same way, the aim of the ‘showroom’ is to create this awareness and these changes from a less rigid perspective than from science.4
Norm-critical innovation as a way forward for responsible innovation? Evidence from a Swedish innovation policy program
Published in Journal of Responsible Innovation, 2022
Lea Fuenfschilling, Linda Paxling, Eugenia Perez Vico
Norm-critical perspectives have received particular attention in the field of design. Design is a conscious process of thinking and acting with the intention of creating desired outcomes (Friedman 2000; Nilsson and Jahnke 2018). The time and economic constraints of conventional commercial design processes leave no room for questioning the embedded norms, which has led to a perpetual reconstruction of existing social norms and values. This is visible, for instance, in the many products that are gendered through the choices of shape, color, material, and names (Ehrnberger et al. 2017), with severe implications for a large amount of the population. For instance, even though women represent half of the car drivers in Sweden, crash test dummies have until recently been designed based on an average adult male body type (Eikeseth and Lillealtern 2013). At the same time, women are three times more likely to suffer from whiplash injuries than men (Krafft et al. 2003). Norm-critical design has emerged as a critique of the status quo of many design practices. But the aim is not to solve existing problems through a new and improved product but to call things into question and problematize existing discourses and boundaries (Isaksson et al. 2017; Dunne and Raby 2013). Norm-critical design attempts to overcome pre-configured ideas of products, practices, and users through norm-critical practices in and between organizations that encourage a more collaborative and critical inquiry into different societal needs.
Integrating human factors early in the design process using digital human modelling and surrogate modelling
Published in Journal of Engineering Design, 2021
Salman Ahmed, Lukman Irshad, Mihir Sunil Gawand, H. Onan Demirel
The design approach discussed in this research allows designers to explore design space to find cockpit configurations that optimise the performance of users coming from different anthropometries. The proposed methodology uses digital iterations on the CAD models with DHM manikins; thus, creating a proactive human factors engineering assessment framework for design exploration without relying on physical cockpit prototyping or human subject data collections. Using this design approach, designers can identify what the critical design variables are and the degree of how design decisions affect human performance. Only a limited set of design variables and performance outcomes are used in this paper to present the design methodology. One can increase the number of design variables and performance outcomes to identify optimum configurations of the cockpits or prioritise one performance outcome over others either for a specific user or a range of users coming from different anthropometric backgrounds.