Earlier this month, @SVADSI invited me for a guest lecture. The video is up on their website so I thought I could share some of what it covered: https://dsi.sva.edu/lecturer/sarah-fathallah/

I went through four of the key critiques of design, and offered four resources for further study for each one.

The first critique evolves around the fact that design and design research can be triggering and traumatizing.

This article, “Practicing Without a License: Design Research as Psychotherapy” (h/t @albanvillamil) is an important one to read in my opinion: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3313831.3376750

The second critique centers around the fact that design is an inequitable and extractive practice, something that I felt was very well argued by @schock in their book Design Justice (which I keep citing to anyone who will listen).

The third critique relates to the colonial nature of design. This is well documented in research (and by extension design research and adjacent disciplines like anthropology/ethnography), though @laurenstaceyw's Social Design and Neocolonialism covers design more specifically.

And the fourth critique is concerned with how design is conservative and technocratic (featuring the wisdom of @otlhogilegordon!). I'm still making my way through Tony Fry et. al's Design in Crisis, but so far so thought-provoking.

All of this in the hopes of leaving the students with some texts for their own individual study (which of course there are many more, but this was a place to start), but also with a call to action, to build and amplify what I call critical design alternatives.

The end. Thoughts?