Critical Design

The purpose of this lesson is to give the student an introduction to the critical dimension of design, which is often considered a field that deals with aesthetics, decoration and styling. To this end, the course will teach various theories that exist today in the field of design and through them the expansion of the field to genres such as 'critical design', 'speculative design', liberating design' and more will be presented.

The first part of the course will clarify the birth of critical theory as part of modernism and how the design professions absorbed these theories. The various design products that developed in the 20th century will be presented alongside the socio-economic revolutions of the time, and alongside the artistic and literary genres of the period. With the help of these case-studies we will examine the meaning of the different social values ??hidden within the different styles in the transition from modernist critical design to postmodernist design that criticizes the modernists concepts.

After the review of the development of critical design in the 20th century, the course will move to a review of various theories that developed in the 21st century in the field of design. For example, we will deal with the social meaning of the term "style" when the examination of the different styles will be accompanied by the question - "Why do things look the way they do?". Other theories we will deal with will be Bruno Latour's "Actor-Network" theory and Sasha Constanza-Chock's "Design Justice." Through these theories we will see how the design incorporated the gender criticism, the ecological criticism, the criticism of disability studies and how it became a tool for social protest against the government.