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Critical Design Practices Catalyst

Critical Design Practices Catalyst

The Critical Design Practices Catalyst (CDPC) brings together designers, researchers and educators to explore the state and impact of critical approaches to design for transforming design practice in an Australian context, and its relation to design discourses, contexts and practices internationally.

Project Summary

Critical Design challenges narrow assumptions and givens about the role designed artefacts and products play in everyday life (Dunne & Raby, n.d.), and in turn the practices and assumptions of design as service to industry. In doing so, critical approaches to design address the reproduction of inequalities through diverse ways of knowing and engaging in/with/by design, including through decolonising design, feminist design, environmental and design justice, and pluriversal design (Costanza-Chock, 2018; Escobar, 2018; Mareis & Paim, 2022; Recklies, 2022).

While such approaches can be accused of existing outside the limitations and constraints of industry, the speculative potential of critical design practices is the capacity to transform paradigms of industry.

Through collaborative research, including practice-based research, the CDPC explores how design knowledge, processes, and practices afford, privilege, and deny certain knowledges and practices, that in turn reproduces ideas about what design practice is, or could be, about. In other words, whose voices and which ways count?

The Critical Design Practices Catalyst (CDPC) brings together design scholars and practitioners to explore the state and impact of Critical Design in practice and research in an Australian context, and its relation to design discourses and contexts internationally. The CDPC kicked off in 2024 with a hybrid symposium framed around a series of provocations on design practices and criticality with an international and national panel of design scholars and practitioners.