Visualizing Design Knowing

In Design Noir Dunne and Raby introduce the idea of critical design as other to affirmative design. Stating that affirmative design “conforms to cultural, social, technical and economic expectations. The argument being that critical design critiques the status quo by proposing designs that present alternative values. It is this emphasis on critical design in relation to critical social theory that doesn’t particularly align with my work…and yet the broader ambitions still seem relevant. When D&R say that critical designs’ purpose is to “stimulate discussion and debate amongst designers, industry and the public about the aesthetic quality of our electronically mediated existence” (p58) I just want to switch out the last half of the sentence for: debate…about the embodied nature of designing and the critical and creative thinking one brings to the practice of design.
D&R go on to say that critical design creates this debate…”by developing alternative and gently provocative artefacts which set out to engage people through humour, insight, surprise and wonder.” (p63) Reading this made me think if I was making a claim that my work operated similarly to critical design and at the least sought to be discursive…then through what qualities do I attempt to do that.

The best I could come up with was: translate difficult to grasp ideas into insight then use open-ended, ambiguous communication to speculate the potential. Not much of a list…but translation, insight, ambiguity and speculation seemed a little too vague.

There is another nice reference where they talk about the value of ‘value fictions.’ This is where they highlight the tension between giving enough context that people can see the products in use while also playing to the audience’s imagination. “A slight strangeness is the key — too weird and they are instantly dismissed, not strange enough and they’re absorbed as everyday reality.” This statement is also interesting to play back in relation to using the ‘faux-information’ design aesthetic. I wouldn’t see my work as social critique or using value fictions but I can see similarities in how the work negotiates a formal language that at first glance masquerades as something that can be simply digested only to find out the visual calls for active engagement. I see that by appropriating the language of data and objectivity the maps introduce their authority, and yet once drawn in, the essay has to beguile the audience to not passively read the terrain but to reflect and imagine what the shifting landscape is telling us. The tension in my work should be between the quality of insight and the level of ambiguity.