Critical Form(ations): Forms of Critical Practice in Design

Design is a powerful force in shaping material reality, cultural values and hu- man behavior. Promising to ease our workload, provide the ‘good life’, signify taste and social rank, design produces ‘persuasive arguments’ that operate in ways not unlike political rhetoric to convey ideas about how things might, or should, be in the future. Design, literally, 'manufactures desire.' And design does not stop at rhetorical argumentation – ideas are inscribed into the enduring forms of images, objects, buildings, infrastructures and systems that constitute visual and material culture. Indeed, architecture has long been understood as a ‘disciplinary practice’, ordering public and private life through form. From the visual hierarchies and physical circulation set in urban plans to the range of motion and sequence of actions built into consumer appliances, designed forms embody a sort of ‘political ergonomics’ that become naturalized into bodily habit, daily routines, social norms and cultural memory. Conveying ideas and regulating ideals, design is complicit in (re)producing ideologies.

As a ‘service profession’, design has typically served the ideals of clients and their markets. Given radical changes to modes of industrial production and consumption as well as current socio-economic and environmental challenges, today, however, we must criti- cally reflect on and reformulate the discipline. Alternative tendencies might be traced, for example, such as counter-movements in the 1960s and ’70s. Such tendencies in design raises questions for us today. How may criticality take form in relation to design practices? How may critical practices articulate alternatives or futures for the design profession?

In this article, I discuss some aspects of critical practices of design. I briefly trace how ideals and alternatives are explored within genres of ‘concept’, ‘conceptual’ or ‘critical’ design. Engaging with the ideas expressed through design practice, such practices illustrate how intellectual and ideological issues might be constructed from within, rather than prescribed from outside. This represents an important shift in relations between theory and practice in design – criticism is not something merely to be done apart from and outside of design but is incorporated within design practices and forms. This shift is also reflected in academia, in which practice-based approaches to design research are expanding . To illustrate some approaches, I present examples from Switch!, a practice-based design research program at the Interactive Institute in Sweden.

This anchors a discussion of how critical practices may take form today, and how, or why, they have an important role for a discipline in transition.