Abstract
This chapter suggests a few touchpoints between Andrew Feenberg’s critical constructivism and current work in critical design, with the hope of initiating a productive dialogue between the two. Taking Feenberg’s notion of the design code as an invitation for such an encounter, the chapter illustrates how designers can take an active, meaningful role in facilitating what Feenberg calls “democratic rationalizations” in three different ways: in (co)design processes designers facilitate collaboration and nurture collective creativity while maintaining as much autonomy for participants to make the design process and its outcomes their own. In (re)design processes designers may be forced to respond to their users’ needs post-hoc, but they may also anticipate users’ needs and even embrace opportunities to provoke users to reflect on the social, cultural and political implications of the technologies they use. Lastly, and most radically, (un)design processes ask designers to let go of (some of) their intentionality and seed potentials for users to appropriate the technologies they design. In Feenberg’s terms, this equals an almost complete relinquishing of “operational autonomy” and the valorization of technical rationality that characterizes it.
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Notes
- 1.
The question of what counts as critical design is quite contentious, as is the question of how it relates to other, more or less congruent design approaches. The term was first suggested by Anthony Dunne in his dissertation (1997), submitted at Royal College of Art and later published as Hertzian Tales: electronic products, aesthetic experience, and critical design (2005 [1999]). Haylock (2018) suggests that the contours of critical design can be drawn along similar lines to those used by Horkheimer to distinguish “critical” theory from the affirmative role of “traditional” theory. In contrast, Bardzell and Bardzell (2013, p. 3300) put forth a more generative role for critical design as a set of practices that move beyond merely providing a social critique of design, as does Malpass (2017, p. 6) who approaches critical design as “a form of socially and politically engaged activity and creative activism.”
- 2.
- 3.
On first mentioning the design code in Technosystem, Feenberg clarifies that it is the same as what he called technical code “in some earlier presentations” (2017, p. 31).
- 4.
A fully fleshed account of the differences between all technical disciplines is beyond the scope of this paper, but for a few influential views of what is specific about design as a form of thinking and doing see Attfield (2000), Cross (2006), Jones (2002), Margolin (2002), Schön (1988), and Simon (1969).
- 5.
It should be noted that participatory design has more than one origin and “flavour” (see Luck, 2018).
- 6.
This is one of the key differences between user-centered design and what Pacey (2001) calls “people-centered” technology.
- 7.
- 8.
Tonkinwise attributes the idea to Anne-Marie Willis and Tony Fry.
- 9.
“The challenge is to blur the boundaries between the real and the fictional, so that the visionary becomes more real and the real is seen as just one limited possibility, a product of ideology maintained through the uncritical design of a surfeit of consumer goods” (Dunne, 2005 [1999], p. 84).
- 10.
While I am aware of previous uses of the term by Pierce (2012) to refer to exnovation; in a symposium held at the University of Applied Arts Vienna in July 2016 to indicate “reducing, simplifying, removing or eliminating design (and complexity)”; and in the title of a recent collection of essays on “critical practices at the intersection of art and design” (Coombs et al., 2018), I use (un)design here as a specific indicator of openness and appropriate-ability.
- 11.
- 12.
John Chris Jones (2002) defines designing as “thoughts and actions intended to change thoughts and actions”.
- 13.
As Eglash (2004) explains, in reinterpretation the change in the artifact is semantic, in adaptation the semantic change is accompanied by a change in use, and in reinvention the material properties of the artifact are changed to accommodate changes in meaning and use.
- 14.
In general, such a theory should account for the dynamic interplay between an artifacts’ capacity to be appropriated and the user’s creative strategies of appropriation within multiple contextual factors.
- 15.
The ability to predict use is part of what Feenberg explains as “anticipation,” one of the operations included in his instrumentalization theory: “Design depends on more or less successful prediction of users’ behavior. Predictions are necessary to anticipate the conformity of the specified design to its purpose” (Feenberg, 2017, p. 183).
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Bendor, R. (2022). Beyond the Design Code: Critical Design and Democratic Rationalizations. In: Cressman, D. (eds) The Necessity of Critique. Philosophy of Engineering and Technology, vol 41. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-07877-4_5
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