The Context of Critical Design: Exhibits, Social Media and Auction Houses

Blythe, Mark; Yauner, Freddie; Rodgers, Paul

doi:10.2752/175630615x14135446523305

Cited by 4 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 4 publications

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“…Certainly, it has often been the case that critical design has been practised and disseminated in ways that are inaccessible to many [11]. However, our participants produced work with the same capacity to 'trouble' as any critical design.…”

Section: Ambiguity In Participatory Designmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This use of ambiguity in design research is perhaps at odds with some conceptions of participatory design. Firstly, it conflicts with a sense of participatory design as a decisionmaking process; Bratteteig and Wagner argue while participatory design should initially open up possibilities for participants, the ultimate goal should be concretising participants' wants and needs into designs [11]. However, recent studies have identified the need for ambiguous or underdetermined designs to enable users' flexibility and adaptability, especially in the context of community activism [5].…”

Section: Ambiguity In Participatory Designmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Troubling Vulnerability

Gatehouse

Wood

Briggs

et al. 2018

Proceedings of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems

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HCI is increasingly working with 'vulnerable' people, yet there is a danger that the label of vulnerability can alienate and stigmatize the people such work aims to support. We report our study investigating the application of interaction design to increase rates of hate crime reporting amongst Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender young people. During design-led workshops, participants expressed ambivalence towards reporting. While recognizing their exposure to hate crime, they simultaneously rejected being identified as victim as implied in the act of reporting. We used visual communication design to depict the young people's ambivalent identities and contribute insights into how these fail and succeed to account for the intersectional, fluid and emergent nature of LGBT identities through the design research process. We argue that by producing ambiguously designed texts alongside conventional outcomes, we 'trouble' our design research narratives as a tactic to disrupt static and reductive understandings of vulnerability within HCI.

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Section: Ambiguity In Participatory Designmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Ambiguity In Participatory Designmentioning

confidence: 99%

Troubling Vulnerability

Gatehouse

Wood

Briggs

et al. 2018

Proceedings of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems

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“…Such critical designs defamiliarise technologies and trends that we might otherwise take for granted creating a space for reflection and critique. But they are also in themselves valuable commodities selling for thousands of pounds and like the critical art of the sixties, cannot escape the ultimate fate of becoming themselves desirable, comforting objects [11].…”

Section: Design Fiction and Critical Designmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…5,6,9,11,32,33]. Some speculative design has even been dismissed as classist and patronizing because it fails to address problems such as exploitation in the developing world [32,33].…”

Section: Design Fiction and Critical Designmentioning

confidence: 99%

Anti-Solutionist Strategies

Blythe

Andersen²,

Clarke

et al. 2016

Proceedings of the 2016 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems

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150

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Much of the academic and commercial work that seeks to innovate around technology has been dismissed as "solutionist" because it solves problems that don't exist or ignores the complexity of personal, political and environmental issues. This paper traces the "solutionism" critique to its origins in city planning and highlights the original concern with imaging and representation in the design process. It is increasingly cheap and easy to create compelling and seductive images of concept designs, which sell solutions and presume problems. We consider a range of strategies, which explicitly reject the search for "solutions". These include design fiction and critical design but also less well-known techniques, which aim for unuseless, questionable and silly designs. We present two examples of "magic machine" workshops where participants are encouraged to reject realistic premises for possible technological interventions and create absurd propositions from lo-fi materials. We argue that such practices may help researchers resist the impulse towards solutionism and suggest that attention to representation during the ideation process is a key strategy for this.

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