Perspectives on Critical Design: a Conversation with Ralph Ball and Maxine Naylor

This paper features an edited conversation with designers Ralph Ball and Maxine Naylor. It explores their thinking in relation to critical design.

In the preface to 'Form Follows Idea' (Ball & Naylor, 2005) Jeremy Myerson describes Ball and Naylor as being regarded among Britain’s most thoughtful furniture designers.

In 1985 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 in colleges in the UK and USA. Over the course of 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 Ralph Ball is Professor of Design at Central Saint Martins University of the Arts London and Maxine Naylor is Professor of Design and Director of the Design Research Institute University of Brighton.

Through practice and academic tenure they have developed a distinctive approach to practice based research and refined their critical perspectives. They describe themselves as critical designers and use design as a critical, visual discourse to communicate ideas about design culture and society today. Taking experimentation as a research method they subject their ideas to a critical process of refutation. They question the work through a scholarly approach that challenges protocols of design to enhance the design profession.

In this conversation the designer’s concepts of ‘open-process’ and ‘design poetics’ are discussed. 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. They describe 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.

• http://studioball.co.uk/