At the beginning of October, on 3 October, the DOX centre in Prague hosted a gathering of people brought together by an interest in so-called Critical Design. A diverse group came to see one of the first presentations of the concept of Critical Design: besides the obvious interest from practising designers, artists and art theorists (the overwhelming majority from UMPRUM), there were UX designers with experience from start-ups or large corporations, architects, a sociologist, a lawyer, an information scientist from KISK in Brno, a philosopher, and theorists of media and of human-computer interaction.
The introduction to this event, unique in the Czech context, reflecting on the current “critical” approach to design, was given by Lukáš Pilka. As a doctoral student at UMPRUM, he had prepared a commentary on selected works from the Czech scene and from the recent Ars Electronica 2018 festival. In his talk he led us into the problem of defining the field of Critical Design and of how it can or cannot be distinguished from speculative design. According to Pilka, both are approaches to design whose aim “is to create and share critical perspectives, to stimulate public debate and thus to direct attention to social, cultural, political or ethical problems”. Much like Critical Theory in cultural studies and continental philosophy, critical design seeks to deconstruct established processes in society and to find alternatives that do not yet exist. Both critical and speculative design try to see the present through the lens of the potentiality of the future, which they illustrate and materialise by producing certain artefacts, processes or otherwise elaborated ideas. Because of their shared aim, speculative and critical design were then spoken of as synonyms.
Critical design is naturally political, for besides analysing the current state of society, culture or technological development, it clearly positions itself against the existing order and proposes how things could or should be. In doing so, at least on paper, it goes well beyond the traditional focus, and not only of product design, on the “artefact” and its aesthetics. Critical design moves design into the sphere of sociological inquiry, cultural criticism and, in many respects, indispensable ethnographic research, which gives designers data tied to a real context about the current state of some social problem that the critically minded designer turns to.
That is also why it makes sense to me that several UX designers came to this Meetup. Their job has gone through considerable changes in recent years: from the detailed design of certain “deliverables” in the form of wireframes, diagrams, user journeys and interactive prototypes, their role has metamorphosed into a kind of holistically thinking “guru” who coordinates visual designers, analysts and programmers in such a way that everything facing the user shows a coherent and unified voice or brand, with which the user interacts in many places of their everyday life (a mobile application, a website, a bricks-and-mortar shop, etc.). In UX design, too, thanks to people such as Don Norman and Alan Cooper or the innovation studio IDEO, one of the most influential in the world, various qualitative and quantitative human-centred research methods (Human-centred design), long established and widely used in sociology, anthropology or ethnography, began to gain ground in design.
A comprehensive grasp of problems from a social, cultural and technological point of view is the ideal of critical design, but, as Pilka adds, in many cases this is not so. Although a focus on the artefact is not necessarily problematic even in critical design, the potential of critical design shrinks considerably if it is reduced solely and exclusively to the object and its aestheticisation. Pilka pointed to several examples where these seemingly radical design objects became exhibits in galleries. This is a problem for critical design, because a holistic grasp of problems requires taking into account the wider context of how and where the design artefact will be used. If the artefact merely sits in a gallery, the outputs of critical design are largely “decontextualised” and reduced to mere tinsel.
By analogy, we can notice in the UX design of digital projects that UX is often confused with the user interface (UI, User Interface). This problem arises because in UX the process leading to some result is not understood as being of equal value to the final output of this process, which, as a rule, really is the user interface. UX design, however, is characterised by the fact that the visual design of digital products itself is preceded by a demanding research, analytical and synthetic phase, which defines the groundwork for the visual design of the user interface. That interface is the final output of the whole UX process, but it is only the proverbial tip of the iceberg. We certainly cannot mistake the tip of the iceberg sticking out above the surface for the whole iceberg, a large part of which is hidden from our sight.
If we did so, we would commit what Martin Heidegger and his French follower Jacques Derrida considered the greatest crime of Western thought: privileging the metaphysics of presence, according to which we look at the present of our lives only, and precisely, through the lens of an already completed present, and thereby neglect the processual (read: evolutionary) and historical character of the present.
Pilka went on to mention something that pleased me, for it is in my opinion one of the most important concepts of the philosophy of media altogether: design objects are not neutral. But what exactly did he mean by that? Although there was no room for questions, I can try to interpret this idea. First I will focus on the topic of the (non-)neutrality of design and technology. Then I will offer my own contribution on how critical design can draw on the current philosophy of technology.
The non-neutrality of technology
Marshall McLuhan already turned our attention, in the study of media, to what media actually do. Unlike the understanding of media as certain institutions, McLuhanian analysis concentrates on the cultural and social, but also technical, aspects of how “media mediate”. McLuhan’s prototypical thesis is that every introduction of a new technology into society (McLuhan uses media and technologies interchangeably) leads to changes in our sensory apparatus and in the way we approach the world. In other words, new technologies modify and extend our perception of the world. The first microscopes uncovered for us a very active micro-world, the Hubble telescope gave us breathtaking images of enormous and ancient bodies of our universe, contraceptive pills put a powerful tool for controlling reproduction into women’s hands, and finally, thanks to ultrasound, future parents can see their child before birth and, on the basis of analytical data, decide about its life – a power that was once attributed to God alone. The introduction of a technology into society means the extension of our perceptual and cognitive abilities, and these in turn change the shape of our culture and society. From this point of view, technologies are not neutral; they contain within themselves certain algorithms, or a potentiality, of how the technology will act on us. McLuhan was accused several times of technological determinism, since more critical interpretations of his work claim that, for McLuhan, the introduction of a technology leads inevitably, that is, deterministically, to certain effects regardless of the cultural and social context.
Although I disagree with this accusation against McLuhan, on the question of the neutrality, or rather the influence, of technology I have lately been turning to the postphenomenological analysis of technologies. Among the leading names of postphenomenology are its founder, the American philosopher Don Ihde, and Ihde’s follower, the Dutch philosopher Peter-Paul Verbeek, who works at the University of Twente. Postphenomenology, as its name suggests, starts from the phenomenology of Martin Heidegger and develops his work with a greater focus on technologies. One of the main principles of postphenomenology is the phenomenological analysis of the relations between humans and technology, above all the way in which technologies mediate our relation to the world. McLuhan had already examined that. Where postphenomenology parts ways with media studies is the so-called mutual constitution of human and technology. The concept of technical mediation, analysed from the point of view of (post)phenomenology, emphasises that mediation is not merely a process during which the human subject and their experiences are influenced by technological objects. Technical mediation is much more radical. It claims that the relation between subject and object is more important, because it is only in the course of this relation that subject and object really come into being. In other words, technical mediation is not some neutral force acting between an ontologically stable and fixed subject and object; rather, this force first forms, at the ontological level, the properties of the object and the subject. Postphenomenology therefore does not reject the Cartesian dualism of subject and object. It modifies it fundamentally, however, by considering subject and object not as fixed entities but as results of the interaction between human and world, where this interaction is mediated by technology.
Critical design and the philosophy of technology
If technology has such a fundamental influence on us, we must say the same about designers. Designers are responsible for the things around us. Depending on its social influence, every technology brings a bigger or smaller package of potential changes in how we see the world, and ourselves too. At first a new technology may seem alien to us, and we cannot imagine how we could make productive use of it in our lives. Over time the technology begins to fade from its conspicuous, even hypermediated state into the background of our lives. It becomes one of many elements of the technological infrastructure without which we could not imagine our lives. One of the tasks of critical design, as I see it, is fundamentally what McLuhan already spoke about: an important task of the artist’s critical approach is to bring to the foreground technologies that are so transparent and self-evident to us that we lose our vigilance before them. We should be critical of the way they transform our lives. Yet most of society does not have a sufficiently equipped and trained sensibility for this. That is precisely why the social role of artists, women and men, who can materialise and speculatively suggest the possible functions and influences of new and old technology is irreplaceable. This cyclical process of hypermediacy => immediacy and renewed hypermediacy of technology was described by the McLuhans in the book Laws of Media as Retrieval. Retrieval describes functions, actions or services that are brought back to the foreground in society after a new technology is introduced.
A fitting example of this one of the four McLuhanian laws of media can be found in the essay Alfanumerická společnost by the important Czech-Jewish philosopher of media Vilém Flusser, who after his forced emigration lived and worked as an academic in Brazil for many years. Flusser gives a brief history of the alphabet and its influence on society. Until Gutenberg, knowledge of the alphabet was the domain of the elite strata of society and above all of the clergy, whereas most of society communicated orally. Literacy was a social advantage, and an active knowledge of how to use this “technology” gave its user power. With the arrival of printing and the democratisation of books, reading turned from a specialised activity into an activity that was of use to wider society as well. In the twentieth century the primacy of the classical alphabet of natural language began to be suppressed with the arrival of digital computers and the logical pressure towards the mathematisation of society. One of the peaks of the digitisation of society is the absorption of all the “old” media, for example photography or film, by digital computers and specifically by applications such as Instagram, Amazon Audible and YouTube. YouTube and Audible in particular, or rather audiobooks in general, offer us an interesting spectacle as they bring the spoken word back to the foreground on a mass scale. Millions of people now do not read classic books but listen to the professional voice of a person reading the book aloud. We are ceasing to read newspaper reflections and essays; instead, we put on our favourite YouTuber – a surprising new dominant cultural entity – so that he can tell us something about the current political situation in his own words. The spoken word is pushing out structured linear text. Working with texts and high literacy are returning again to the specialised field of academic research and to the elite strata who still have the time to set time aside for reading.
What consequences will this have for society, for educational institutions and methods of learning, for literacy and, finally, for our ability to concentrate on a demanding, linear activity, which reading certainly is? From my point of view, these are traditional questions of the philosophy and sociology of technology. These academic disciplines offer hypotheses, empirical data and analyses of where the current situation is heading. Where these disciplines are much less capable, and quite by design, is in speculative visions of the future. At the same time, they tell us very little about how we will feel in such a future.
Critical design is a natural partner of philosophical inquiry. It has the tools and the skill set needed to make something graspable out of the abstract. Philosophy made flesh.
For critical design to be able to offer a really suitable alternative view of the problematic parts of our culture and society, it should learn from the problems of UX design and take into account the current ultra-modern approaches to studying the interaction of human, technology and environment. Approaches that have their origin in second-order cybernetics and explicitly prefer holistic and systemic views of technology. It will help critical design overcome its fixation on the artefact if designers realise that, alongside the technological objects themselves, the environments and platforms that new technologies create, deliberately or unintentionally, are much more interesting.
In his lecture Living in the Acoustic World, McLuhan articulated the ecological view of technology well: the automobile by itself would have no meaning if there were no infrastructure of roads, motorways and transport possibilities in general. The automobile is only the visible surface of a much deeper and more complex system of relations between infrastructure, social practice and individual technological objects. While driving, it is even only a part of the automobile that connects us into that complex system of transport: the steering wheel, the gear lever, the various gauges. In other words, the user interface of the automobile is a gateway into the deeper surface of the transport system.
If, then, we want to study the current relations between human, society and technology, we as designers, HCI experts and theorists must focus not only on the surface of the interface of technologies, as the place where all the parties mentioned meet explicitly, but also on the deeper, infrastructural parts that remain hidden from us most of the time.
The task of critically minded designers is to uncover, by an archaeological method, what we consider unproblematic and self-evident. To go beneath the surface of things and deconstruct our ignorance of what techno-media do to us. This requires more than just an aesthetic sense or craftsmanship; it also requires an excellent knowledge of how things reached their present stage, or in other words of everything that precedes and follows the moment we press some button on our smartphone or turn on the water tap.
The British poet and expat living in the USA, T. S. Eliot, once wrote in his essay Tradition and the Individual Talent that a poet should be connected with the tradition of his field. He should be able to perceive “the historicity of history” and “the historicity of the present”. A critical designer should similarly perceive the historicity of the problems he works on, not only in terms of their evolution in time but, perhaps surprisingly, in space too. To perceive the problem not as the problem of creating some object but as the necessity of re-designing the spatio-temporal structure of the environment and the system in which the object will exist.
From such a systemic point of view, a critical designer can then, for example, help a more sustainable and ecological world not so much with a beautiful bamboo cup as with a radical campaign that exposes the absurdity of wasting fruit or vegetables because they do not meet supposed requirements of visual attractiveness. The deconstruction of this practice in fact found that people are much more rational and less spoilt, and will understand that if food is safe, they do not hesitate to buy it, since for most people appearance is not the main criterion when shopping.
To think spatio-temporally, structurally and systemically, including the skill of designing a prototype of a solution. That, from my point of view, is the agenda for critical design.