DIFFICULT FORMS:
CRITICAL PRACTICES OF DESIGN AND RESEARCH

Ramia Mazé & Johan Redström

 

 

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.

 

In Proceedings of International Association of Socities of Design Research 2007, Emerging Trends in Design Research. The Hong Kong Polytechnic University School of Design, November 12 - 15, 2007.
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© 2007

johan redström