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Think about the roles that “users” take in a design and think up another role that a person could hypothetically take (that they wouldn’t normally take). For example, design for marginalized communities is often framed as being about closing the digital gap, i.e. providing marginalized communities with the technologies that are valued by people in the majority. The role of the community then is to be helped, or to become more like majority communities. A critical design might explore products that a marginalized community could use to purposefully differentiate from majority communities. This might be done to avoid having to adopt values and practices of a more powerful community that they do not want.
Take activities or events that are “normal” and move them into an unexpected context that throws them into a new light. E.g. productivity software that allows people to become as effective as possible at avoiding doing what their boss actually wants.
Imagine a role that we might have and put somebody different into it. For example, in reflecting on our own relationship with exercising, we could create a treadmill designed for ‘free-range’ pigs… the pig is doing what we think humans need to do. When we see the pig on the treadmill, the unfamiliarity of the situation might make it easier to realize how treadmill exercise might shortchange our lived physical experiences in the world.
Take a trend in society or in technology design and push it to its logical conclusion. ”Well, you know, everything these days seems to be moving into social media, what if we lived in a world where it was only at all possible to communicate with the world through social media. At anything you said, your mom could comment on it too!” Fit4Life is an example of this from this class.
Imagine what the world is like that’s just like our world but we invert one of the values. The Afterlife Battery is an example of this in that the design shows an alternative, aggressively non-spiritual valuing of life after death.
Take things that you usually don’t see and make them available for reflection. E.g. you don’t normally see electromagnetic radiation, but the Compass Table, which has compasses built into its surface that move in line with local radiation fields, allows you to see it. Now all of the sudden you do see it and then you start to wonder about it and why the designer might have wanted to bring it to your attention. Special note about this strategy: It’s the wondering that’s important for critical design; if this is just information visualization e.g. for persuasion (i.e. an unambigous, instrumental goal), it is not critical design.
Take issues that people don’t usually talk about and really make them a part of everyday life. See for example Sputniko!’s Menstruation Machine, a music video involving a device that simulates the effects of menstruation and invites people who don’t usually experience menstruation to experience some of the effects.
Take a product that would normally be passive and make it active. E.g., Accessories for Lonely Men includes a device that breathes on the back of your neck. Allow products to do things autonomously that you normally wouldn’t. “What if your lamp could walk? Now it has its own agenda that’s not your agenda–it’s the lamp’s agenda. What would change, how would your life be different with this lamp? It could for example be a hostile lamp–maybe your lamp wouldn’t like you very much and you need to be extra nice to that lamp.”
This involves creating products that suggest multiple narratives of use. How could you make a product that could be read, for example, in a positive way AND in a negative way? This could be awesome product and simultaneously a nightmarish product. One example we talked about in lecture was Listerine strips that make you not feel hunger—what an awesome way to diet! A little too awesome.
Take an issue people prefer not to pay attention to, but bring it up in a way that gently encourages people to consider it as part of the range of human experience. For example, in Objects for Lonely Men, a plate thrower robot raises questions about domestic abuse and codependency in relationships – it may lead us to reflect on how violence in a relationship could potentially be part of the things a person could (problematically) miss about it, even though we would prefer to simply dismiss that as morally unacceptable.