Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

Critical Design is becoming an increasingly influential discipline, affecting policy and practice in a range of fields. Matt Malpass's book is the first to introduce critical design as a field, providing a history of the discipline, outlining its key influences, theories and approaches, and explaining how critical design can work in practice through a range of contemporary examples. Critical Design moves away from traditional approaches that limit design's role to the production of profitable objects, focusing instead on a practice that is interrogative, discursive and experimental. Using a wide range of examples from contemporary practice, and drawing on interviews with key practitioners, Matt Malpass provides an introduction to critical design practice and a manifesto for how a radical and unorthodox practice might provide design answers in an age of austerity and ecological crisis.

Table of contents provided by Syndetics

• List of Figures (p. ix)
• Acknowledgements (p. xiii)
• 1 Introducing critical design (p. 1)
• Challenging orthodoxy (p. 4)
• Challenging colloquialism: The problem with critical design (p. 4)
• What's so critical about critical design practice (p. 7)
• Why study critical design? (p. 8)
• Researching critical design practice (p. 10)
• 'Critical' in critical design practice (p. 10)
• Industrial design as a discipline (p. 12)
• The structure and approach to writing (p. 13)
• 2 History (p. 17)
• A forgotten history of critical design practice (p. 17)
• An emerging critical design practice (p. 18)
• Challenging hegemony (p. 19)
• Anti-design (p. 21)
• Participatory design (p. 24)
• Unikat Design: Adding nothing but the concept (p. 26)
• Representative design (p. 28)
• Designing interactions (p. 29)
• Critical design at the Royal College of Art (p. 31)
• Synergies between precedent and contemporary examples of critical design (p. 33)
• Conclusion (p. 38)
• 3 Theories, methods, and tactics (p. 41)
• Design as a medium for inquiry (p. 41)
• Post-optimal design and para-functionality (p. 44)
• Rhetorical use (p. 47)
• Discursive design (p. 47)
• The aesthetics of use and meaningful presence (p. 49)
• Exploratory potential (p. 51)
• Design fiction (p. 54)
• Speculation and preposition (p. 56)
• Constructing publics (p. 61)
• Ambiguity (p. 62)
• Satire (p. 67)
• Conclusion (p. 69)
• 4 Criticism, function, and discipline (p. 71)
• Design art (p. 71)
• Design art and society (p. 73)
• Function in critical design practice (p. 78)
• The paradox of critical design in commercial use (p. 84)
• Modelling the field (p. 85)
• Design at users (p. 87)
• Directing critique through design practice (p. 88)
• Conclusion (p. 89)
• 5 Practice (p. 91)
• Associative design (p. 92)
• Speculative design (p. 100)
• Critical design (p. 107)
• Design practice as satire (p. 113)
• The uses of narrative (p. 115)
• Rationality and ambiguity (p. 116)
• Towards a taxonomy of critical practices (p. 117)
• The taxonomy as an analytical tool (p. 120)
• Applications of the taxonomy (p. 120)
• Conclusions (p. 121)
• 6 Critical design practice and its disciplinary contribution (p. 123)
• Summary (p. 123)
• Challenging disciplinary orthodoxy (p. 128)
• An extended role for industrial design: Discipline, science, and society (p. 131)
• Notes (p. 133)
• Bibliography (p. 137)
• Index (p. 148)