Embodying ethics : Critical Design Thinking

 Critical Design Thinking

The questioning of the status quo as suggested by Papanek has informed new design strategies and thinking. On analysis of Socially responsible design conceived by Papanek in his book, he outlines a perspective that brings social awareness and industrial production together. Papanek's writings from the book ‘design for the real world’ has been a reference for this project's in identifying a critical positioning for social and sustainable development. The Project embodies crucial aspects such as ethics and ecology and social economics.

Another Radical design thinker Buckminster Fuller explored proposals within the culture of sustainability. `The challenge of creating a sustainable world has become a necessity now. Our survival as a human race depends on it. The understanding of sustainability as an essential value has demanded a rethinking of current attitudes. Little by little, peoples value have been questioned every now and then which has lead to gradual change in their behaviour and attitude. This is happening now with the culture Of sustainability. .

Dune and Raby on Critical Design Practice

Continuing on a critical analysis of design for real people, Anthony Dune and Fiona Raby definition of Good design is to ensures that products embody an ethic, a view of what it means to be human. It’s all about values. embodying a specific idea of human nature—a recognition of how we like to live, what we like to do, how we really are.

Critical Design can be a catalyst or a form of social critique.. It tends to deal with the dark side of human nature, which often is negative and accept the world as a disharmonious constantly unstable reality. It is Reflection on how complex troubled human beings we are, rather than easily satisfied and ideal consumers we are assumed to be.

Dune and Raby focus has been not on creating commercial objects but products that appeal to peoples imagination in an intellectual manner. Their critical perspective is based on analysis of everyday life experinces and not necessarily talk about issues of sustainability unlike the radical thinkers like Papanek and Fuller of the 50's and 60's. The issues concerned are more to deal with complex human emotions and on technology: its future, implication and impact. Their aim is to generate insights and understanding that can be used in teaching, developing new research methods that possibly influence commercial practice too.

Design philosophies like Form and function should be more connected to their social significance than seperate commercial, aesthetic, linguistic or utilitarian areas. They remind us that the reason many experimental designs are not taken up for mass-production is not because of technical and technology problem rather because they challenge the status quo.

The common tendency of all the critical thinkers is that they tend to challenge the status quo. In Dune and Raby's work the focus also is to create emotional responses like wonder and astonishment. This project has tried to inheret these aspects of their work as wonder and astonishment are emotions that create a differentiation that embody our perception and provoke creative reaponse to the objects.