Group items tagged

Here is the amazingly rich, detailed and resource heavy presentation by designer Tobias Revell. A graduate of the Design Interactions program at RCA, Revell charts a survey of pre-cursors and significant features of Critical Design as well as myriad components of Design Fiction from corporate to speculative futures thinking, including:Diegetic Prototypes, Future Mundane, Agents of Fear, Materials, Synthetics -- each section filled with insight and contextual links! Highly recommended primer! Tobias Revell. Critical Design/Design Fiction Lecture Finally Written Up. (Looooong) Published December 2013. Accessed March 8, 2014. http://blog.tobiasrevell.com/2013/12/critical-design-design-fiction-lecture.html

A micro-manifesto from Dunne&Raby, addressing historical predecessors to Critical Design, similar lines of inquiry, uses and abuses of this way of approaching design, too. Much of this FAQ text seems to have been elaborated on in their recent book, Speculative Everything. This is a fairly quick read that provides a fairly concise summary of the use of "speculative design proposals to challenge narrow assumptions, preconceptions and givens about the role products play in everyday life." (Dunne&Raby) Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby. Critical Design FAQs. Published 2011. Accessed March 7, 2014. www.dunneandraby.co.uk/content/bydandr/13/0

Design Fiction by Portland based designer Laura Allcorn. Here, as part of an exhibit called Human+, she explains her Human Pollination Project, a miniature tool set constructed to facilitate pollination tasks in anticipation of colony collapse of honey bees. The combination of meticulous craft, background research and an implied preposterous scale of the task in question position this work in the realm of critical design, opening up new questions alongside possible answers. Laura Allcorn. Human Pollination Project. Human+, Science Gallery Published April 2011. Accessed March 8, 2014 https://dublin.sciencegallery.com/humanplus/human-pollination-project/

Here's a great essay by Carrie Lambert-Beatty on Parafiction. She discusses the "Nikeplatz" work we saw in class along with several other works by various artists. Parafictional endeavors negotiate context collapse as strategic asset for opening up dialogue and debate. As noted in class, this particular genre of contemporary art has many similar goals and intentions as Critical Design. Carrie Lambert-Beatty "Make-Believe: Parafiction and Plausibility" October 2009 129, 51-84

This is a project that could be categorized as design fiction. The artist/architect Mark Shepard explores the possible ways in which the proliferation of 'sentient cities', urban environments equipped with many, many networked sensing devices, might jeopardize privacy and increase unsolicited data collection. He does this using the affordances of fiction, designing and building functional prototypes for an imagined 'near-future' context. This sort of 'critical making' is a strong supplement to traditional modes of scholarship which Shepard also pursues. Mark Shepard "Sentient City Survival Kit" 2010 http://www.survival.sentientcity.net/info.html Accessed January 25, 2014

Wired article debunking Amazon's Prime Air marketing ploy. Behind the seamless and seductively realistic design fiction video, numerous questions from fuel costs to air traffic congestion, unidentifed flying accidents, airspace regulation and so on hover on the periphery of this otherwise alluring prospect. Include a link to the actual video from Amazon. Watch it again after contemplating the externalities, or hidden costs, of such a seemingly seamless operation. It's little wonder what such high definition, cinematic realism affords Amazon. An intensification of scrutiny is needed from the viewer, a critical media viewing, to short-circuit blind faith in the realities promised in such depictions of the future Marcus Wohlsen. "Even if the Feds Let Them Fly, Amazon's Delivery Drones Are Still Nonsense" Wired: Business. Posted December 2, 2013. Accessed March 8, 2014. http://www.wired.com/business/2013/12/amazon-drone/

Like the old websites accessed through the Wayback machine, this is another great archival resource for research. Primary source documents offer direct reflection of the language and design from a specific point in time, without the inherent filtering of such content through secondary sources. Specifically, like Radical Software, Whole Earth Catalog was a critical tool within the networked countercultures of the 1960s / 70s. Here, you can skim through digitized collection of Whole Earth Catalogs, subsequent "CoEvolution Quarterly" , "Whole Earth Software Catalog" and other pursuits. Identify recurrent patterns along with curious or lesser known topics of these cybernetically inclined thinkers. The site itself is a remediation of the magazine as "evaluation and access device," using popular categories of the original for navigation. "Whole Earth Catalog: Access to Tools and Ideas" Accessed February 2, 2014. http://www.wholeearth.com

This beautifully animated four-minute mini-film provides a simple yet profound response to a poignant question: What is the connection between social networks and being lonely?

Nice! This is very powerful example of critical media practice. Augmenting traditional rhetorical appeals and persuasive gestures with the affordances of digital animation and sound design.