TECHNO-HETEROTOPIAS. CRITICAL DESIGN AS MICRO-HUMANISM
Emanuele Quinz
* published in Design for Change, L. Gauthier (ed.), BlackJack Editions, 2011, pp. 42-58.
1.
The first robot is shaped like a red ring. It is very autonomous, very concentrated. But it has an
idiosyncrasy: it prefers to avoid electro-magnetic waves. As soon as a radio, television, or cell phone is
switched on, the robot moves, looking for a place that is out of reach.
The second robot is shaped like a funnel. As with the first, its function is still enigmatic, but its
behavioural patterns are obvious: as soon as someone gets close to it, it stares at them, then starts
moving about, becoming nervous and more and more hysterical.
The third robot is like a sentry: to make the data archive it is safeguarding accessible, it uses a retinal
scanning technology. But to be sure of not making a mistake, it asks the user to train his/her eye at the
camera for an interminable period of time.
The fourth robot is highly intelligent, but very fragile. As the prisoner of a rudimentary, underdeveloped body, it is totally dependent. As a result it inspires in users a gratifying feeling of control…
With the four robots that make up the series Technological Dreams, the English designer twosome
Dunne & Raby let us into a vision of the future. A near future, where machines are everywhere. But
Dunne & Raby’s robots are not efficient, high-performance tools—intelligent computers at the service
of human beings. On the contrary, they are imperfect, opaque machines, which replace functionality
by neurosis.
Similarly, the interactive clothes produced by the Canadian designer Ying Gao remain enigmatic.
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While using the same technologies (intelligent textiles) as Wearable Computers , they stand apart
from them. Their interaction is not instrumental and functional but, on the contrary, constructed upon
an opaque, unstable exchange: they seem to breathe when they hear us breathing, they vibrate and
become undone when we approach. Their language remains elusive and mysterious. If Wearable
Computers are posited as intermediary devices for the user, Gao’s clothes become actual
interlocutors. By refusing any functional transition, they are no longer prostheses. They are neither
skin, nor body, they are neither objects nor merely machines. They become subjects.
Like Dunne & Raby’s robots, the relationship they set up has to do with dialogue. But a dialogue
borrowed from mystery, a state of suspension and anxiety.
These visionary projects introduce a critical dimension into design.
Instead of coming up with technologies which perform better and better, design proposes useless,
dysfunctional, precarious and unstable machines.
Instead of pursuing functionality and innovation, design focuses on faults and shortcomings, disorders
(in people and machines), accidents, deficiencies, ambiguities and paradoxes.
By adopting this focal approach, aimed at everyday objects and behavioural patterns, design
questions the impact of technologies in our imagination, in our behaviour, and in our habits.
To define this attitude, Dunne & Raby have come up with the term Critical Design: “…Critical Design
uses speculative design proposals to challenge narrow assumptions, preconceptions and givens
about the role products play in everyday life. It is more of an attitude than anything else, a position
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rather than a method” . In retrieving the heritage of Anti-Design, which developed in Italy in the 1960s,
in opposition to the cult of objects and the state of alienation introduced by wholesale industrialization,
this critical stance of design today takes the form of a whole host of propositions, ranging from the
“London school”, founded by Dunne & Raby at the Royal College of Art in London, to the conceptual
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methods of Superflex, Marti Guixé, and Jurgen Bey from Droog Design .
All these propositions stem from a common front, which reverses the methods and aims of design.
Instead of setting changes and improvements in the living and working conditions of the masses in
motion through the design of tools and interfaces, these propositions are aimed at a more subtle, more
underground change to things individual and private.
2.
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The horizon that this critical stance is aimed at is that of “informational capitalism” , of contemporary
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society transformed by the impact of technologies. When information technology becomes ubiquitous ,
invisible but omnipresent, and distributed here, there and everywhere, a logic of dematerialization and
globalized interconnection is imposed, and the economy shifts from markets to networks. The cultural,
social and political infrastructure is mainly made up of data circulation and the ebb-and-flow of
information. Thanks to developments in micro-computing and networks, and the spread of portable
and integrated equipment, processors are becoming more and more requisite in each and every
function—they are working their way into each and every object in our daily lives. Technologies are
becoming essential components of the environment which surrounds us; they are becoming our
environment.
The impact of the exponential development of digital technologies is far-reaching in a quite novel way.
In no time at all, the stakes and challenges became clear: changing technologies meant not only
altering our living environment, but also imposing changes in our perceptions of the world, in our
behavioural patterns, and in our relations with others. Changing technologies meant changing people,
and moving humankind along into a new phase.
This change has been enacted through a strategic convergence involving engineering, science and
design, and has concentrated a huge amount of power in the hands of a small avant-garde of
developers. Charged with a brief that went beyond the horizon of technics and technology, they very
swiftly turned into gurus, enlightened by a fierce positivism, and fired by utopian visions.
It is in this context that critical design is emerging, like an uncompromising and visionary reaction. On
the one hand, this stance attempts to delimit zones of resistance of the human in the face of the
relentless advance of technologies, in relation to the globalized world of ubiquitous computer
technology. On the other hand, it relativizes design’s “mission” as a vehicle of change.
3.
In the 1960s, the development of technologies restored a topical element to the idea of humanism. On
this front, two radical visions came up against one another: on the one hand, technological progress is
seen as a lever for the project of a revitalized human society, on the other it is tolling the knell for
human beings, in the face of the triumph of machines. Humanism is becoming the terrain of a dramatic
clash between utopia and dystopia.
On the one hand, people boast about the possibilities offered by Virtual Reality of “improvising reality”:
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in each one of its attributes, the virtual world is discrete, parametered and manipulable depending on
our desires and our projects, by freeing people from a tragically “mandatory” reality.
On the other hand, people riposte with the tragic prophecy of the “disappearance of reality”: “the
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media bring about the disappearance of the event, the object, the referential” . This is the “perfect
crime”, the “murder of reality”: on the one hand, the objects which make up the world are gradually
replaced by their images and their “simulacra”; on the other, the depth of matter, through procedures
of capture and digitization, is absorbed by the immaterial flatness of the pixel on the surfaces of
screens. Just when there is no longer any knowledge or experience possible outside of the media
horizon, it is no longer reality that is obligatory (henceforth out of reach and unverifiable), but the
ghostlike persistence of simulacra.
In the same way, two positions square off against each other around the idea of intelligence.
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On the one hand, people advocate the project of a “collective intelligence” , encouraged by the
infrastructure of contemporary communication techniques and the networked interconnection of
computers. This “fast synergy of intelligences” would be capable of underpinning a community-based
sharing of knowledge and know-how, as well as decisions, and would give a new democratic uplift to
society.
On the other hand, people are announcing the advent of “Singularity”, the fatal overtaking of human
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intelligence by the intelligence of machines .
In the face of the uncertain prospect of the exponential growth of technologies, people are, on the one
hand, calling for the comeback of humanism and, on the other, the end of the human.
Over the years, these prophetic visions have faded and blurred.
In these visions, be they paradisiac or apocalyptic, the individual disappears, dissolved in an
anonymous mass or replaced by a machine. To these shining visions, critical design responds with
“fictions”, all swathed in subtleties, which present the psychological and social impact of technologies,
on the scale of the individual and of everyday life.
Versus the extremism of utopia and dystopia, critical design is proposed as a heterotopia, a “counter10
place” , a zone of rupture and resistance.
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The aim is to introduce “doubt or complexity in the techno-utopian visions” . It is through questioning
and doubt that critical design is asserting its goal: giving rise to a gap or discrepancy, creating a
reprieve of consciousness, a change that is not situated at the level of social macro-structures, but at
the level of the individual.
4.
When the 1990s came to an end, metaphysical spectres, paradisiac peaks and apocalyptic nadirs
were met by a more soothing, “human-centred” vision of technology, an established and stable order.
Ubiquitous Computer Technology reverses the prospect espoused by Virtual Reality in the 1990s:
instead of “constructing a new word inside the computer”, it tends to “spread invisibly across the world
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which already exists” , and create a merger with (and thus the disappearance of) the technical
apparatus in the environment about us.
Design is once again the protagonist in this reversal, this refocusing around the human. A new form of
humanism emerges which, once the shrill tones of utopia and dystopia are abandoned, replaces the
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machines at the service of man and his requirements, and which proposes a “calm technology” . Little
by little, the gap between the world of the daily round and its functions and the simulated and
interfaced world of computer technology is filled: the computer becomes invisible; interfaces merge
with the surfaces of objects; interactions by way of interfaces based on a system of commands, on the
arborescences of a menu or on graphic representations, are replaced by more “natural” paradigms of
interaction, which are based on the actions of and ways of using everyday objects, which call for less
attention, less effort and concentration, and are less stressful. Intelligence is no longer detoured
towards an elusive entity; rather, it is dissolved, incarnated in the environment that surrounds us, at
once perceptible and interactive. Within the enlightened cohorts of engineering and design, the
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watchword is Ambient Intelligence : the environment captures and directly responds to the needs of
the user. For example, a system interconnects light and other ambient controls (heating, humidity
levels, etc.) with a biometric device incorporated in an item of clothing, in such a way that the
environmental conditions can be modulated in relation to body temperature changes and a person’s
movements... Computer technology is everywhere, but it is not frightening any more.
This seemingly calm situation nevertheless hides insidious paradoxes, which critical design strives to
pinpoint.
The ubiquity of information forms a cultural, social and political landscape dominated by information
flows, by networks and thus by those who manage this information and these networks. To borrow the
words of Jaron Lanier, an early pioneer and, these days, a renegade in relation to the digital
revolution, the power gathered in the hands of a technocratic oligarchy, made up of engineers,
scientists and guru-designers, who have all been behind the rapid development of computer
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technology, imposes an oppressive system, which he calls “cybernetic totalism” . By way of clever
seduction, values, desires and patterns of behaviour are all subject to a massive standardization.
Objects disappear, lose their materiality and thus their capacity to create an affection, duly becoming
invisible—mere functions. Gradually the individual is replaced by the abstraction and anonymity of
social networks, undermined by a philosophy, which reduces the complexity of experience to
information transfers, which promotes “discrete” intelligence to the detriment of sensation and emotion.
People are pushed towards self-abdication, towards a fatal subordination; they are reduced to being
“users” of imposed technologies...
In this context, design becomes purely “affirmative”, limited to the confirmation of the status quo
imposed by “Corporate Futurologists”. Objects produced by design are inert emblems which repeat
established official values; “their slick surface distracts us from the dystopian vision of life they wih for
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us...” .
Critical design, on the other hand, sees itself as subversive. With its host of useless machines,
disconcerting objects and strange uses, it opens up heterotopic spaces, areas of resistance.
As Dunne says, the aim is to “raise awareness, stimulate discussion, and provoke debate, all of which
can help achieve technological futures that reflect the complex, troubled people we are, rather than
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the easily satisfied consumers and users we are supposed to be” ...
To this end, the critical methodology of design is based on the twofold system of the manufacture of
strange, dysfunctional objects, and the design of “fictions”.
Instead of presenting “fictional functions” (like those imposed by industry and the market, critical
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design proposes “functional fictions” , which illustrate unusual uses of electronic and computerized
systems. These realistic narratives (often imbued with a dark and scathing wit) speak out against the
paradoxes of our mythologies and the conformities of our behavioural patterns. By summoning to the
side of design the means represented by literature, photography and, above all, film, they announce
alternative scenarios, of the present but more especially of the future: a sort of “design fiction” is traced
out which, like “science fiction”, becomes a “captivating medium with which to explore social changes,
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the impact of the future and alternative societies” .
In contrast with the compulsive dictatorship of innovation, many recent productions are re-introducing
“analogical” looks and uses to advanced digital systems, with a nostalgia that is at once corrosive and
poetic: from Hulger’s “vintage” prostheses, which make it possible to connect 1960s’ telephone
earpieces to the iPhone or to a skype-linked computer, to Daniel Rozan’s Mechanical Mirrors, which
simulate the dynamics of the pixels which form an image with motorized metal mini-plaques... design
becomes an arena of individual freedom—where expression is given to forms of stubborn resistance
to the colonization of everyday life by digital technologies.
Where fashion is concerned, Ying Gao’s interactive clothes result from the same polemical approach.
The dresses which make up the Playtime series (2010) bristle with sensors that are sensitive to flash
bulbs: when a person tries to capture the image with a video camera or an ordinary camera, the piece
of clothing undergoes a metamorphosis, it breaks up its moving forms, by becoming blurred and out of
focus. By being evasive, the clothing introduces a shadowy zone, and hence an area of freedom for
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the individual, challenging the hegemony of spectacle and image, and of a “generalized fashion” .
In 2008, Dunne & Raby’s questioning, along with that of their colleagues and students in the Design
Interactions department at the Royal College of Art in London, extended from sensitive and intelligent
electronic objects to the area of bio- and nano-technologies, technologies which will have an influence
on our lives in the near future.
In a paradoxical extension of the ubiquitous prospect, computer technology is not only finding its way
into everyday objects, but it is also reaching living matter; it is becoming an “invisible component of
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life’s fabric” . Manipulation of the genetic code permits a control over biological matter, something
which was previously inconceivable. By converging with computer technology, biology is gradually
changing from a descriptive science into a discipline of intervention and reformulation in relation to the
living world, and increasingly becoming a terrain for design.
In this way, Dunne & Raby, Nathalie Jeremijenko and the Material Beliefs collective (which includes,
among others, Elio Caccavale, James Auger, Tobie Kerridge and Jimmy Loizeau) are taking note of
the paradoxes and dangers of this extension. The objects and the absurd scenarios which they
present, at times comic, at others scary, do not simply incarnate “future forms and functions”, but they
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also reveal “above all their social, ethical and psychological consequences” .
5.
The vis polemica of critical design does not spare the “human-centred” approach. This approach,
which was widespread in interactive design in the late 1990s, and underwritten by scientists who in no
time became gurus, like Don Norman, bases the conception of design on an analysis of users’ desires
and needs.
Values such as simplicity, comfort when using interfaces, and the ‘usability’ of electronic devices, all
become central: design is freeing itself from standards dictated by technological innovation and
scientific progress to focus more on the perceptive, cognitive and psychological processes of the user
interacting with the object. For Dunne, this approach remains “affirmative”, consensual, and dependent
upon the demands of marketing and the restrictions of industry and the market, and it also tends to
reduce the complexity of the individual to his role as user.
Dunne’s critique targets three of the pillars of this approach: the ‘User-Friendly’ notion, the concept of
pleasure, and the conception of the “flow” or “optimal experience”.
Dunne contrasts the ‘User-Friendly’ label with “(ab)user-friendly” and “user-unfriendly”: instead of
being efficient, simple and comfortable to use (and thus reassuring, and comforting), the objects
proposed by critical design are complex and enigmatic; they disorient, and at times they fairly and
squarely put people off. This “strangeness” of the object summons unusual uses, appropriations and
hijacks, and abuses, in a process of systematic subversion, of functional estrangement which Dunne
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calls “para-funcionality” .
In contrast to the transparentness and transitiveness of the ‘User-Friendly’, there is a promotion of the
opaqueness of objects and uses, like a lever for awakening a “sceptical sensibility”, and facilitating
questioning about the packaging imposed by technology.
Likewise, the notion of “pleasure”, which has become a basic front in the qualitative investigation of
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‘User-Centred’ design, represents a target of Dunne’s criticism. For Patrick Jordan , the success of a
product depends on its capacity to give rise to pleasure in the user—at once physical (the object must
be pleasing for the senses), social (it must facilitate social interaction, and represent the real and
desired image of the user in the public context), ideological (it must tally with certain stylistic ideals,
and certain philosophical, religious, ethical and other values), and psychological (it must give rise to an
emotional attachment). Pleasure thus becomes a means not only for improving the interaction and
‘usability’ of a product or technology, but above all a strategy for establishing its commercial success,
for producing desire. Dunne contrasts this overly consensual, not to say demagogic notion of pleasure
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with what he calls “complicated pleasures” : the misuse of technologies and the hijacking of functions
and forms generate the “shudder of transgression”, giving rise to complex psychological experiences.
In this sense, the object of critical design is also defined as “post-optimal”. Dunne here makes
reference to the notion of “flow” or “optimal experience”, put forward by the psychologist Mihaly
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Csikszentmihalyi as a fundamental value of ‘human-centred’ design. This notion defines a state of
total focus of the subject’s consciousness on the activity under way, where all external distraction and
all effort are done away with, to make way for a sort of intense “merger” with the environment.
On the other hand, the opaqueness of the critical object, its functional alienation, and its subversive
and dysfunctional character, are posited as obstacles and call for a cognitive effort and reflection. The
user stands back and observes himself, questions his behaviour and his relations with the
technological environment. With this systematic Verfremdung, applied to design, “a form of social
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research integrate aesthetic experience with everyday life through conceptual products” . With an eye
on the creation of a gap or discrepancy, Dunne talks of Design Noir (like the film genre), which he
introduces as a conceptual tactic capable of “generating existential moments”, and, by way of
disturbing narratives “dramatizing” everyday acts and interactions with machines, so as to render
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visible the dark side of their psychological impact .
An example of this tactic of appropriation is represented by the Placebo collection, produced by Dunne
& Raby in 2001, made up of eight objects which use electro-magnetic fields. The project presented
both objects and images which depict the reactions and behaviour of users. If, to all appearances,
these furnishing objects seem familiar and everyday, their function is altogether unexpected. From the
Nipple Chair (an armchair with two nipples on the back which vibrate in response to magnetic fields) to
the Compass Table (a table on which a compass moves when a portable computer or a cell phone are
placed on it), these objects are not aimed at any functional efficiency; on the contrary, they are totally
useless from a practical point of view, they function like fetishes, like placebos, and shift the theme of
design from the instrumental function—invariably standardized—towards a mission of catharsis with
regard to individual drives and tensions. As Dunne explains, “As designers, we cannot always change
reality, but we can change the perception that we have of it, providing users with psychological
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peace” .
Similarly, the machines produced and presented by Noam Toran in Desire Management (2006) are
“private” and enigmatic tools, which describe strange patterns of behaviour which go hand in hand
with disorders, deviations of desire and pleasure.
Behind the flat and comforting horizon of technological consumerism hide complex individualities,
made fragile by disorders, and territories made uneven by aberration and obsession spread out—
becoming special areas of exploration for critical design.
6.
In the shift from the mechanical age to the information age and the period of ubiquitous computer
technology, the area in which design intervenes moves from functions and interactions to values. The
definition of “good design” takes on an explicitly social and political connotation.
In the Industrial Design of the 1980s, the imperative was ergonomics—how to best adapt objects and
environments to the user’s physical body; in the Interaction Design of the 1990s it was humancentred—how to best adapt objects and environments to the user’s cognitive processes; lastly, in the
2000s, the challenges of design shifted to the arena of ethics—how the human factor manifests itself
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and how human beings can live with each other, and with objects and environments .
Because of the impact of technologies, design is gradually moving away from its disciplinary
framework, from its traditional area of action, and is being endowed with a mission of “global
architecture”. It ranges from the production of communication interfaces to the design of systems of
exchange, “instead of looking at product design, it looks to economies of movement; instead of
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isolating graphic design, it considers the economies of information” ...
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It becomes a vehicle of “massive change” as is proposed by the manifesto/exhibition of Bruce Mau .
For Mau, “new design” is configured like an activity, which is “distributed, plural and collaborative”. Its
scale is no longer that of the individual’s uses and needs, but that of the “common good”: design
“guides everyday actions, configures our consciousness and our spaces, and alters our lives”, in a
nutshell it “gives shape to the networks of invisible actions and flows which, in their turn, will give
shape to our future”.
For the author of Science-Fiction (and of Design Fiction), Bruce Sterling, the society of ubiquitous
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computer technology is defined as “synchronic” : at the moment when each computerized and
connected object is amplified by information layers that can be manipulated in real time, the system of
objects becomes a “synchronized” system of data, traces and trajectories. And it is the synchronization
of this system, “the management of relations between people and time” which, for Sterling, becomes
the raw material of new design.
In these visions, which are not intended as utopian but, on the contrary, realistic, design takes on a
pivotal role, as a vehicle of social change in its macro-structures. Its responsibility is to inform a better,
more human and more sustainable future. Humanism becomes an ethical imperative.
In the face of the utopias and dystopias of the 1990s, and in the same way as it confronts this new
humanist incarnation, critical design retains a sceptical stance in relation to design’s areas of
intervention.
It contrasts an “all-encompassing” brief and macro-changes with small-scale actions, which are
addressed to individuals. Dysfunction has preference over functionalism, neuroses over positivism,
regression over innovation, the glorification of alienation and othernesses over the concept of
standards, and questions hold sway over answers. It basis its action on doubt and questioning, and it
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favours the “modest forms of micro-politics” .
So, Interrogative Design by the artist Krysztof Wodiczko is constructed like something akin to a
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“transgression of borders and orders” . By identifying in excluded categories—foreigners,
immigrants, “strangers”—valuable forms of otherness and basic heterotopic resources, he tries to
make cracks in the monolithic and overwhelming horizon of a society designed in every aspect—
geopolitical, psycho-social and ethical alike—by directives of economic power.
By producing “transitional objects”, “psycho-social artifices”, capable, once more, of constructing
“narratives”, Wodiczko highlights the alienation of these figures (of the vanquished), and their
unacceptable suffering in the struggle for survival, and design here is keen to give rise to a “revelation,
and interrogative passage”. So, Critical Vehicles (1988) for the homeless, and Alien Stuff (1993), rods
fitted with mini screens carried by immigrants in the urban space, work like methods of
communication, propose “fictitious narratives” which are provocative and light-hearted, in order to stir
up thinking, but above all an “emotional understanding”, “a legalization of the strangers’ illegitimate
experience, their illegible past and their illegal present”. In the same basically political spirit are also
posited the actions of “guerrilla design” of the English collective Troika, the activism of Marie Sester,
on the borderline between architecture and urbanism, and the “collective interactive systems” of
Usman Hacque: these interventions come across like “tactics”, opposed to strategies of power, like
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incursions or, as de Certeau would put it, “poaching” operations , which use critical appropriation to
open up a breach in inertia, found a “temporary community”, and drive the “momentary rebirth of a
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democratic public place” .
Critical design prefers a modest and subtle humanism to the utopian humanism of the techno-gurus,
and the grandiloquent variant of Massive Change. A humanism which is not guided by certainties, but
which is, on the contrary, undermined by doubts. A humanism, which is not based on the successes of
science and technology, and human knowledge, but which, on the contrary, presents deficient,
useless, disconcerting technologies, as well as fragile, anxious and pathological individualities. A
humanism, which deals with humour (often dark), enigma and suspense. A humanism, which refuses
the notion of humanity as an abstract entity, and, on the contrary, focuses on individuals in their
singularity. Which does not want to fuel a radical change of society but, on the contrary, provoke a
simple shudder of doubt, a reprieve of consciousness. A micro-humanism.
7.
The objects proposed by Critical Design are in most cases one-off pieces. At times they do not go
beyond the status of prototypes and they are not marketed.
The fictions which accompany them, which borrow the languages of film, photography, performance,
and installation, are mainly presented in the white box of a gallery or a museum, in the protected and
sacred venues of contemporary art.
Likewise, their methods of conception and design, the conceptual approach above all, put them very
close to processes of art.
On the one hand, questioning of the impact of technologies draws critical design closer to artistic
practices which use new media. In fact, and increasingly, critical design is filling the place left empty by
the parable of these practices, by the shipwreck of so-called “digital art”, which became too quickly
stuck in an illustrative logic, in a poetics of the demo, ultimate gadget and plug-in. Just when digital art
is becoming “affirmative”, or simply decorative, and losing the force of awareness-raising which had
driven its emergence, design is replacing it as the new outpost of critical resistance.
On the other hand, the heterotopic stance, micro-humanism, rather compares critical design with the
“post-utopian” perspective conveyed by contemporary “relational” practices. These practices, which
became widespread in the 1990s, conceive of the work of art as a “social interstice”, as “a space of
human relations which while fitting more or less harmoniously and overtly into the global system,
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suggest possibilities of exchanges other than those which are in effect in this system” .
Like Critical Design, relational art proceeds by way of the creation of “micro-situations, showing barely
any discrepancy with those of ordinary life”, and aims at “creating or re-creating links between
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individuals, and giving rise to new forms of confrontation and participation” .
But, as Jacques Rancière explains as he summarizes this movement, in the face of the ethical
imperative, art scales down its ambitions “in relation to its capacity to transform the world, but also with
regard to the assertion of the singularity of its objects. This art is not the introduction of the common
world through the absolute singularity of form, but the re-arrangement of the objects and images which
form the already given common world, and the creation of situations capable of modifying the way we
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look at things and our attitudes with regard to this collective environment” . According to Rancière,
relational art swiftly abandons the critical register in favour of the playful register and plunges into
blasé melancholy “with regard to the common world which art carried within it, if it had not been
betrayed by its political enrolments and its commercial compromises”; it founders in a disillusionment
which derives from a “consciousness of its limits, the tendency to play on the limitation of its powers
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and the very uncertainty of its effects” .
By placing itself at a deeper level within the system, critical design lays claim, on the contrary, to an
inexhaustible positivity. As Dunne & Raby explain, if “fine art often refer to popular culture, industrial
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design is popular culture” , it invariably focuses on products, regarded as a category of objects
capable of infiltrating people’s daily lives.
This proximity with the individual and the context of his life, this capacity to infiltrate the daily round
and speak a language which anybody can understand, allots design a special position, which keeps
alive any confidence in its potential for action. It is the prospect of an impact, of a possible change—
limited to doubt, questioning, and the reprieve of consciousness—which gives depth to the scenarios
of critical design, which, despite the irony and corrosive sarcasm of these propositions, stops them
toppling into the abyss of cynicism.
And, by being situated between the disproportionate ambitions of the design of Massive Change and
the disenchanted melancholy of relational art, critical design assumes a central role in the
contemporary cultural landscape.
Critical design, which is sceptical about technological utopias and dystopias, and uncompromising with
regard to affirmative design, through the immoderate use of paradox and dysfunction, constructs a
powerful realism, a poetics—which is also a politics—of discrepancy.
Translated by Simon Pleasance & Fronza Woods
Notes
1 Wearable Computers nowadays represent a burgeoning sector of technological research. Developed back in
the 1980s with the prospect of computer technology being distributed here, there and everywhere, they explore
the ergonomic potential of on-board computer equipment. Cf. S.SEYMOUR, Fashionable Technology: The
Intersection of Design, Fashion, Science and Technology, Wien New York Springer, 2008.
2 A.DUNNE, F.RABY, Critical Design FAQ, on line at http://www.dunneandraby.co.uk/content/bydandr/13/0
3 Cf. the exhibition Designing Critical Design (curated by Jan Boolen), produced in 2007 by the Z33 Centre at
Hasselt in Belgium.
4 The critical perspective on the shifts of ubiquitous computer technology was ushered in by the sociologist and
urbanist Manuel Castells, who, as early as in 1996 (M. CASTELLS, The Rise of Network Society, Wiley 1996,)
stigmatised this phenomenon as a manifestation of a new society, based on a “informational capitalism”. Likewise
the American economist J.RIFKIN (The Age of Access. The New Culture of Hypercapitalism, New York,
J.P.Tacher/G.P.Putnam’s Sons, 2000) talks about a “new culture of capitalism” based on ubiquitous computer
technology.
5 This term was first used in 1988 by the American engineer Mark Weiser, head of the Xerox company in PARC
M. WEISER, The Computer for the 21st Century (1988); an updated version of this text is available on-line at:
http://www.ubiq.com/hypertext/weiser/SciAmDraft3.html
6 The notion of Absolut Physics was put forward by Jaron Lanier, indefatigable inventor of concepts and
technologies, just when he was making the first steps in Virtual Reality. If, in order to act in the world around us,
we need to use the limited resources of our bodies, or intermediary objects--as extensions of the corps -, in Virtual
Reality we can make direct modifications, with no go-between. Each and every detail of the world of simulation is
discrete, parametered, manipulable digital matter: environment, arrangement, form and movement of objects and
avatars. Within virtual space, which is not only transitional but also transitive, reality is no longer tragically
“obligatory”, but becomes the result of “improvisation”. Cf. J.Lanier, The Virtual Visionary, Interview with Jaron
Lanier, in The Guardian, 29 December 2001.
7 J.BAUDRILLARD, Les stratégies fatales, Paris Grasset, 1983, p. 95.
8 P.LEVY, L'intelligence collective. Pour une anthropologie du cyberespace, Paris La découverte 1994, English
translation Collective Intelligence, Basic Books, 1997.
Other theorisations – from Teilhard de Chardin’s Noosphere to the Connective Intelligence of Derrick De
Kerckhove, to the Ecology of the Mind of Gregory Bateson, to the Hive Mind of Kevin Kelly – give off common
sense. The model of a “community-based democracy of networks” has been explored by H.RHEINGOLD in The
Virtual Community, Reading MA, Addison-Wesley 1993, Cf. on this subject the critical summary of
T.MALDONADO, Critica della ragione informatica, Milan Feltrinelli, 1997, p.11-92.
9 R. KURZWEIL, The Age of Spiritual Machines, Penguin 1999; The Singularity Is Near: When Humans
Transcend Biology, Viking Adult 2005. This prediction is based on an extreme generalization of Moore’s Law
(whereby the number of transistors on a chip doubles about every two years), which points to the progress of
technological development, in particular the increase in the speed of calculations and the greater complexity of
algorithms. This exponential technical evolution marks the sway of machines over people, who are limited by their
“biological condition”.
10 M. FOUCAULT, Des espaces autres (lecture given at the Cercle d'Etudes Architecturales, 14 March 1967), in
Architecture, Mouvement, Continuité, n°5, October 1984, pp. 46-49.
11 A.DUNNE, F.RABY, Design Noir: the Secret Life of Electronic Objects, Basel August/Birkhäuser 2001, p.6.
12 WEISER, The Computer for the 21st Century (1988), an updated version of this text is available on-line
http://www.ubiq.com/hypertext/weiser/SciAmDraft3.html
13 M.WEISER, J.SEELY BROWN, The Coming Age of Calm Technology, Xerox Parc 1996, available on-line:
http://www.ubiq.com/hypertext/weiser/acmfuture2endnote.htm
14 E.AARTS, S.MARZANO, The New Everyday. Views On Ambient Intelligence, Rotterdam 010 Publishers 2003.
15 J.LANIER, You Are Not a Gadget. A Manifesto, New York Alfred A.Knopf, 2010.
16 DUNNE, RABY Op.cit. 2001, p.6.
17 DUNNE, RABY, Design for Debate, in Neoplasmatic Design, Architectural Design, Marcos Cruz and Steve
Pike (eds), Vol 78 No6. http://www.dunneandraby.co.uk/content/bydandr/36/0
18 TROIKA, Fictional Functions and Functional Fictions, Interview with Anthony Dunne, in Digital by Design,
edited by TROIKA, London, Thames & Hudson, 2009.
19 DUNNE quoted in A.MIDAL, Design Fiction: the Parallel Destiny of Design, interview avec Anthony Dunne, in
Tomorrow Now. When Design Meets Science Fiction, exhibition catalogue, edited by A.Midal, Luxembourg
MUDAM, 2007, p.143.
20 Cf. G.LIPOVESKY, Les temps hypermodernes, with Sébastien Charles, Paris Grasset, Nouveau Collège de
Philosophie, 2004.
21 R.A.L.JONES, Soft Machines. Nanotechnology and Life, Oxford University Press, 2007.
22 DUNNE, RABY, Critical Design FAQ, cit.
23 DUNNE, Hertzian Tales: Electronic Products, Aesthetic Experience, and Critical Design, Cambridge MA, MIT
Press 2005, p.42.
24 P. W.JORDAN, Designing Pleasurable Products: An Introduction to the New Human Factors, CRC Press
2002.
25 DUNNE, op.cit.2005, p. 63.
26 M.CSIKSZENTMIHALYI, Flow, New York Harper, 1990.
27 DUNNE, Op.cit. 2005, p.20.
28 DUNNE, RABY Op.cit. 2001, p.46.
29 About Placebo see DUNNE, RABY, Op.cit. 2001, p.75 ss.
30 A.DUNNE, Interpretation, Collaboration, And Critique, Interview with Raoul Rickenberg, on-line at
http://www.dunneandraby.co.uk/content/bydandr/465.
31 Massive Change, edited by B.MAU, in association with the Toronto-based Institute Without Boundaries,
London, Phaidon 2004, p.16.
32 MAU, Idem: “What we see over the last hundred and fifty years, and in a dramatically accelerated pace over
the last fifty, is that design is changing its place in order of things. Design is evolving from its position of relative
insignificance within business (and the larger envelope of nature), to become the biggest project of all. Even life
itself has fallen (or is falling) to the power and possibility of design. Empowered as such, we have a responsibility
to address the new set of questions that go along with that power. At the same time, we acknowledge the hybris
and inherent paradox of the new position we find ourselves in: We designing nature and we are subject to her
laws and powers”.
33 B.STERLING, Shaping Things, Cambridge MA, MIT Press, 2005, p.45.
34 J.RANCIERE, Malaise dans l’esthétique, Paris Galilée 2004, p.34.
35 K. WODICZKO, Designing the City of Strangers, in Critical Vehicles: Writings, Projects, Interviews, Cambridge
MA, MIT Press 1999, p.4-15.
36 M. de CERTEAU, L’invention du quotidien, Paris 10/18, 1980, p.82-89.
37 K.WODICZKO, Idem.
38 N.BOURRIAUD, Esthétique relationnelle, Dijon Les Presses du Réel 1998, p.16; English translation Relational
Aesthetics, Les Presses du Réel, 1998
39 RANCIERE, Op.cit., p. 33-34.
40 Ibid., p.54.
41 Ibid, p.83.
42 DUNNE, Op.cit. 2005, p.146.