Critical and Speculative design
Critical Design was first coined by Anthony Dunne in the book Herzian tales (1999) as a way to unify a range of different practitioners so that discussion could be made easier. Critical Design looks at current issues and technologies and uses methods like satire to criticize. Critical designers often take old methods and make them into new technologies and contexts. Critical designers, as Matt Malpass says in Critical Design in Context (2017), “seeks to avoid conventional production and consumption, offering an alternative use of industrial design.”
Speculative design is similar in the regard that it stands separate to the market. Though its concerns are different. Speculative design looks to the future, but not exclusively as Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby point out in Speculative Everything (2013 p129):
There is an assumption with speculative work that it is organised toward the future, but it can simply be somewhere else, a parallel world to our own rather than a possible future. Once you drop the future aspect of speculative work you instantly broaden the scope for aesthetic experimentation and inventive portrayal of alternate realities.
It is through these alternative realities that speculative design manages its critique. By comparing and contrasting the speculated design with our current times speculative designer create the room for discussion about the potential of the design. The reason for doing this is to take a look at new science and technology and to challenge the ethics and societal impact of the technology (Dunne, Raby 2013 p49).
Speculative design uses deliberate ambiguity to generate debate around the design. Though they make sure not to stray too far from reality so that the designs and their supplementary content can be related to. Designers put the technology in quotidian contexts to help facilitate this (Malpass 2017).
Bibliography:
Malpass, M., 2017. Critical design in context : history, theory, and practices, London: Bloomsbury Academic.
Dunne, A. Raby, F., 2013. SPECULATIVE EVERYTHING. In Speculative Everything: Design, Fiction, and Social Dreaming. CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS; LONDON, ENGLAND: The MIT Press, p. 159.
