Critical Design

Critical design creates ‘design fictions’ - narratives that challenge uses, behaviour and values. These fictions liberate the design object from the constraints of functionality and efficiency, giving it a critical, social, and even political dimension - they invite strategies of resistance and otherness. Critical design is a critical form of thought expressed in material rather than words. A language consisting of structure and form, with which we mediate ideas. A language that sets aside thoughts about appearances, user friendliness corporate identity, and allows designers to develop design objects that invite unfamiliar uses and attach new behaviours and other ways of reading to them. The Studio will set a prism, through it we’ll challenge our foundational assumptions about design, with the goal of bringing us a renewed discussion of the values that lead our creative world. The studio aims to enrich and contribute to the field of visual communication with practical examples presented by the students, thus placing visual communication as an essential discipline within design criticism.