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.
Chapter 1: Introducing critical design
Challenging orthodoxy
Challenging colloquialism: the problem with critical design
What's so critical about critical design practice
Why study critical design?
Researching critical design practice
'Critical' in critical design practice
Industrial design as a discipline
The structure and approach to writing
Chapter 2: History
A forgotten history of critical design practice
An emerging critical design practice
Challenging hegemony
Anti-design
Participatory design
Unikat Design: adding nothing but the concept
Representative design
Design Interactions
Critical Design at the Royal College of Art
Synergies between precedents and contemporary examples of critical design
Chapter 3: Theories, methods and tactics
Design as a medium for inquiry
Post-optimal design and Para-functionality
Rhetorical use
Discursive design
The aesthetics of use and meaningful presence
Exploratory potential
Design fiction
Speculation and proposition
Constructing publics
Ambiguity
Chapter 4: Criticism, function and discipline
Design Art
Design art and society
Function in critical design practice
The paradox of critical design in commercial use
Modelling the field
Design at users
Directing critique through design practice
Chapter 5: Practice
Associative design
Speculative design
Critical design
Design practice as satire
The uses of narrative
Rationality and ambiguity
Towards a taxonomy of critical practices in design
The taxonomy as an analytical tool
Applications of the taxonomy
Chapter 6: Critical design practice and its disciplinary contribution
Summary
Challenging disciplinary orthodoxy
An extended role for industrial design: discipline, science and society
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