Critical Thinking & Experimental Processes
RISD, Industrial Design · Fall 2019
Co-taught by Chris Woebken, Paolo Cardini and Agi Haines
Experimental objects expose the assumptions behind industrial design, questioning what counts as a problem, whose needs matter and what design is for.
Student work & course documentation
Course & program documentation
Course outline
Experimental objects expose the assumptions behind industrial design, questioning what counts as a problem, whose needs matter and what design is for.
studio · graduate · Paolo Cardini — Co-teacher · Agi Haines — Co-teacher · Selected documentation
Critical Thinking & Experimental Processes
- FA19 at RISD MIDGrad studio taught by Paolo Cardini, Agi Haines, Chris Woebken
In this course, we will focus on areas of the design discipline that treat design not as a vocational tool for developing products that solve problems, but rather as a practice of critical inquiry. What does this mean? Historically, Industrial Design has been tightly coupled with industry and commerce, with designers designing functional products that improves people's lives, and more importantly, sells! Sustainable design, social design and various other approaches within design have tried to make the products of Industrial Design less harmful. However, design as critical inquiry is different from all these approaches, in that it attempts to use design to question and reveal the underlying assumptions of the systems in which we operate as designers, but also as citizens, humans, animals. This approach to design is variously known as critical design, speculative design, discursive design. Interestingly, Critical Design itself has been critiqued as being not sufficiently radical. Industrial Design has also traditionally been seen and presented itself as a somewhat logical and goal-driven process of problem-solving. We will also be turning this aspect of traditional design on its head, and use design as an experimental process, non-goal driven, open-ended yet iterative. We can refer to this as Experimental Design. The word ‘experimental’ is tricky, however, because it can refer to two quite different, almost opposite things: tightly controlled experiments as conducted in the sciences, or experimental inspiration-seeking activity in the fine arts. In this course, we will tend toward the latter meaning.
So: Experimentation and Critical Inquiry are the two fundamental elements of this studio class. We will learn about these approaches in design, but more importantly, through their research and making, students will be invited to discover the unknown and ask relevant and pointed questions.
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