As a kind of 'criticism from within', conceptual and critical design inquire into what design is about Ð how the
market operates, what is considered 'good design', and how the design and development of technology
typically works. Tracing relations of conceptual and critical design to (post-)critical architecture and anti-design,
we discuss a series of issues related to the operational and intellectual basis for 'critical practice', and how
these might open up for a new kind of development of the conceptual and theoretical frameworks of design.
Rather than prescribing a practice on the basis of theoretical considerations, these critical practices seem to
build an intellectual basis for design on the basis of its own modes of operation, a kind of theoretical
development that happens through, and from within, design practice and not by means of external descriptions
or analyses of its practices and products.