Interrogations on Critical Design today

Why the education and practice of critical thought is relevant today? What impact could a critical practice have in reality? Why is it important that artists, architects, designers etc. develop a public voice?

The faculty of the Master in Critical Design answers these questions to give a detailed overview of the new master programme that will start this September. It explores the instrumentalisation of critical design in creating impact in specific spatial contexts and equips students with the tools necessary to participate in the international conversation on issues such as geopolitics, environmental activism, political design and critical architecture.

Today the world is marked by complex cultural conflicts that directly affect society in a number of social fields such as the economy, politics, law, and media. Critical thought is essential to navigate such complex cultural conflicts. Society is facing challenges that are very complex, such as climate change, artificial intelligence, and geopolitical shifts, which can be untangled through critical thought.

A critical practice can untangle complex issues, elevate unheard voices, and create realities that are missing in society. A critical practice is essential today to overcome polarization, apathy, and defeatism within society. Misinformation, social bubbles, and attention deficits generate both cultural discord and indifference that can be resolved and addressed with critical practices.

The canonical approach and voice of institutions lack creativity, truth, and flexibility which artists, architects, and designers can provide with vision in policy-making and social innovation. Today artists are experts that can contribute actively to society-building. They participate with research-based work and socially engaged practice, creating new knowledge and skills that institutions and everyday people need for expanding their existence.

We find ourselves in an era unlike anything we’ve seen in past decades. The climate crisis with all its tentacular ecological and societal collapses, an alarming inequality and job insecurity, the rise of populism and nationalism, and big shifts in geopolitical structures and geopolitical belief systems are pressing our time. But this also means that we live in an era ripe with opportunity. If designers’ raw material is the imagining of the things to come, then an exciting, more just world is ready to be unveiled —designed. Academia is one of the crucial platforms to do so. A critical, slow, thoughtful, and omnichannel approach to understanding and rechanneling the present is what education is about, and as we are currently seeing with campus protests spreading around the globe, academic institutions are, and have been for a long time, unique, inspiring, and hopeful probes into immediate-future worlds.

There are three types of design practices: Enablers, agitators, and disruptors. Critical design falls somewhere within the spectrum of the second and third categories. These are categories that require the production of questions urgent for the world at large. If the enabler designer assesses impact in terms of reproducibility, perpetuity, and the capacity to stir capital, critical designers’ impact lies in the ability to convince and convene.

The project of producing publics and audiences is one of most pressing projects any designer and architect should tackle. The discipline of design is a social service endeavor. As such, creating platforms for public conversations is as much an act of generosity as it is a fundamental tool to successfully respond to particular situations where design is required.

What hope do we have in this world, without our own critical thinking?

Because there are no better means to make change, no less in an emergency.

Architecture is rarely about building buildings — what architecture is,
is the very fabric by which we live together in one place.

Because, paraphrasing William Graham Sumner, “Criticism is the examination and test of propositions of any kind which are offered for acceptance, in order to find out whether they correspond to reality or not. The critical faculty is a product of education and training. (…) It is our only guarantee against delusion, deception, superstition, and misapprehension of ourselves and our earthly circumstances. Humans educated in it cannot be stampeded. They are slow to believe”.

It is the only kind of practice that can have a positive contribution in improving scientific and political (ethical) knowledge.

Knowledge and learning happens mostly in a social environment. Therefore it is crucial to learn how to discuss our ideas with others.

Because we have nothing else but today, but the present moment, but ourselves alive in this precious moment. Critical thinking means being fully alive, fully connected to creativity, to problem solving, to living to our greatest potential in order to be able to welcome death with joy.

Critical practice is the courage to act and change those things that I can change.
Critical thinking is the wisdom to know the difference between those and the things that I can only accept.
As the well-known ancient serenity prayer goes:

Existence, grant me the serenity
to accept the things I cannot change;
courage to change the things I can;
and wisdom to know the difference.

In my experience, if you make the change inside of yourself, reality shifts.

Because artists, architects, designers are the ones designing brand new worlds, creating utopias, painting new landscapes with no limitations. We all do anyway: bakers and parents, farmers and Amazon drivers, each one of us does it in a particular way.

But artists, architects and designers are the white canvas in which new possibilities manifest.