Mini-project 4: Critical design

A list of Critical Design Strategies.

Goals

The goal of this project is to give you hands-on practice in doing critical design.

After doing this project you will be able to:

• Use different strategies to create critical designs.
• Iterate on early critical designs in order to improve their clarity and effectiveness.
• Articulate a critical design in terms of the strange, but compelling lifeworld that it projects and in which the design makes sense.

Overview

In this project, you will create a critical design proposal that responds to an unacknowledged human need. You will design a products for an alternative lifeworld that you imagine in which that need plays a different role than in our world, in a way that stimulates creative reflection on how we design for needs in our world. Your critical design proposal should be original. It need not be ‘practical’ in the everyday sense, in fact it probably shouldn’t be, but it should be technically plausible in the present or very near future.

Instructions

1. Select a genuine human need that is widely unacknowledged or underrecognized in most contemporary technology design. We recommend you choose a behavior that has a lot of subtlety or nuance, or where you are taking a stance on that behavior that genuinely questions how people typically think of that human need (as opposed to selecting a need about which your expected audience will likely already agree with you, or which you are seeking to reveal as simply ‘good’ or ‘bad’). Bring your draft human need to lecture on Nov. 16 for the lecture which will double as a Critical Design Workshop.
2. Develop 5 initial design ideas that explore the nuances and potential of addressing that human need, and/or question how that need is normally side-lined in design. Each design should be based on a different critical design strategy, e.g. putting aliens in roles we can imagine for ourselves or pushing existing trends to an extreme. These strategies will be covered in lecture on Nov. 11 and Nov.16, and a handout explaining them will be available on Canvas.
3. Consider the possible lifeworlds that these designs evoke. What is different about them? What is interesting about them? What potential do they hold for critical exploration? Based on these considerations, Choose 2 of your ideas that seem most promising.
4. Develop 2-3 variations of each design/lifeworld pairing. For example, you might change the context of the design, change the technological platform it is instantiated in, or change the potential audience of the design. You will have time to workshop your designs during section on Nov. 12 and Nov. 19.
5. From your revised versions, select and further polish the most effective design/lifeworld pairings.
6. Compose a one page, fictional description of the use of the design set in the lifeworld for which it is imagined. For example, you could describe a scene out of the life of someone using your device. From your description, the reader should clearly be able to understand the nature of the design itself, and how it makes sense in the lifeworld for which you are designing.
7. The project is due on Dec. 1 at 11:59pm.

A word of caution: Students sometimes interpret critical design as free license to imagine morbid, gross, obscene, or disturbing designs. In doing so, they risk losing their audience, creating psychological trauma for the TAs, and, while doing so, missing the central point of critical design: to create a conceptually clear, compelling argument embodied in design that can be read and appreciated by a target audience as a form of intellectual pleasure. Critical design should balance on the knife’s edge between something strange and something desirable. Be careful that your design does not inadvertently discourage your reader from engaging with the alternative world that your design proposes by being morbid, gross, or obscene. If your design involves delivering shocks to its user, for example, that is a bad sign.

Submission

Deliverables:

1. A description of a genuine, but unacknowledged human need you are addressing in this project. (2-3 sentences). It is possible that your need changes from your initial designs to your final designs, if so, please describe the initial and final needs.
2. The most promising 3 of your early design sketches (approximately 3 sentences each; images possible but not required). Each sketch should use a different design strategy in order to illuminate some aspect of the chosen human need. Each design sketch should be clearly labelled with the design strategy it is intended to exemplify.
3. As described above, a fictional description (about 500-750 words) of a design in its lifeworld which follows the principles of critical design, and is significantly advanced from the original design idea. Designs may be presented in text-only or using a blend of images and text. You will not be judged on art skills.
4. A list of 2-3 open-ended questions that that design/lifeworld is raising about the need you have identified and/or how it is typically addressed in design. These questions are ones that reading the fictional description will ideally already raise in the mind of your reader. These questions are not directly graded but give the TA additional guidance towards understanding how you intend your design to be understood.

Your designs are due electronically to Gradescope by 11:59pm on Wednesday, Dec. 1. Your submission must be in .pdf format. As always, if you prefer to do design work with your hands, you may do your project on paper and upload photos of the result, embedded into a pdf. It is also OK to do your written work by hand and upload photos as long as your handwriting is legible and the scan quality is good.