Kaikki aineistot
Lisää
Arts expansion in academia has called into question concepts, norms and regulations concerning writing and publishing. Given precedents of ‘critical practices of design’ and ‘research through practice’ grappling with such issues, I take these as ways to reconsider the academic activity of making a book (‘bookmaking’) as a critical and feminist practice of design. Through specifically feminist modes articulated by Jane Rendell – namely collectivity, interiority, alterity, materiality, and performativity – I describe two edited books, through which I am able to discuss critical dimensions and feminist positions in the detailed everyday activities of bookmaking. I argue that feminist practice questions and opposes, but it also projects, activates, and enacts alternative norms or ideals – here, alternatives to academic norms and regulations concerning edited books. Naming and elucidating detailed aspects of bookmaking activity, as mundane critical ‘practise’ continually deliberated and performed, it is nevertheless possible to draw relations to larger theoretical issues. For example, discussing across differently situated/conditioned bookmaking practices makes it possible to trace implications of bookmaking within larger political economies, socio-economic structures, theoretical and ideological commitments.
We are witnessing a notable increase in the publication of anthologies and collections of design writing and research. This is good news for the field, seemingly reflecting its maturity, and indicating a pool of established writings from which to draw. As a textbook, D. J. Huppatz’s edited collection, Design: Critical and Primary Sources, provides a one-stop resource for students and designers alike; as a snapshot in history, the anthology sets out to be problematizing and problematic, opening to question a canonical view. To interrogate this phenomenon, we invited four reviewers to each examine one volume of Huppatz’s collection.
Scenarios for policy and the public are increasingly given form by designers. For design, this means ideas about the future – futurity – is at stake, particularly in genres of ‘concept’, ‘critical’ and ‘persuasive’ design. While critical approaches are present in futures studies and political philosophy, design assumptions and preferences are typically not explicit, including gender norms, socio-ecological practices and power structures. Calling for further studies of the politics of design visions, I outline possible approaches and elaborate through the example ‘Switch! Energy Futures’. I reflect upon how competing visions and politics of sustainability become explicit through our process, aesthetics and stakeholders.