MA Design Critical Practice

"The purpose of this project is to “critically confront” and examine some of the “most fundamentally held beliefs through which we think and create as designers.” Through revealing and understanding the creative process and metaphor behind the ceramics piece: ‘Eye Patch’ (the object I have chosen from the exhibition ‘The Power of Making’) and using these findings as a critical lens, I have challenged the habits of my own practice as a product designer and “the metaphors we live by” as human beings. The metaphor behind this object revealed that the way we design, produce and engage with materials and objects reflects the way we understand and exist in this world. The research shows that we exist in this world trapped in a destructive “technological understanding of being” where “we deal with things, and even sometimes people, as resources to be used until no longer needed...” (Fairfax and Rosenberg 2011).

We, as designers, can either contribute to, or challenge this “technological understanding of being”. Inspired by Miller’s words that “It is only when the juxtaposition of a material is odd that we are shocked into awareness…” I have created a Ceramic Tool Set. The idea behind the tools is that they will shatter if used. This provokes thoughts about the fragile relationship between the man and making. Furthermore it reflects the implications that designing, without comprehensive awareness of cause and consequence, can have on our world. Instead of creating another object that serves as a “standing reserve” , I have created ‘food for thought’, thus supporting the idea that the change begins in the mind. As Heidegger said “Once we realize … that we receive our technological understanding of being, we have stepped outside the technological understanding of being.”"

"The purpose of this project is to explore the essence of ‘storytelling / narrative’ and technologies, new and old that support storytelling. The project looks into the power of storytelling and technology, what lies beneath the ‘surface’ and how a combination of the two can be employed to bring about a meaningful thinking process. The project is contextually framed by Heidegger’s essay ‘The Question Concerning Technology’ particularly with his notion of ‘clearing’ (Germ. ‘Lichtung’). Furthermore, the project looks into the psychology of human desire through Freud and Lacan’s theory, and how Freud’s findings were misused for capitalistic propaganda in order to create consumer culture.

To understand the relationship between the human psyche and capitalism, and the implications of capitalistic propaganda, we have been analysing Slavoj Žižek and Noam Chomsky. In the context of today’s destructive capitalistic, consumerist and productivistic way of living, which Heidgger calls ‘technological understanding of being’; there is a considerate lack of desire for meaning. The project looks to recreate our desires, induce the moment of realisation and clear the space for a meaningful thinking processes by turn the system against itself, in a playful and absurd way."

Heidegger's seminal work 'The Question Concerning Technology' offers a way of thinking about technology that is different to the common understanding; that it is human activity which involves using something, usually a machine, to get something done. We explore through this essay how Heidegger undermines this understanding and unearths a different approach to technology which will allow humans to find a more free and creative relationship to it. Jean Luc Nancy's analyses complement Heidegger's essay, examining human 'being' in today's world, how society has changed through history, and how today's situation is unprecedented, in part due to the relationship that humans have with technology.

This paper initially focuses on the way design and other creative disciplines are compromised and reduced in their practices in order that they may ‘fit’ within academe, with its axiological cast determined by the epistemologies of the sciences and humanities; a cast that has no place for the uncertainties of creative practice. It then explores the epistemological bases of design thinking and suggests that if design thinking is knowledge it is knowledge-in (as)- potential (potentia). This is a knowledge built with uncertainties - a pre-reflective knowing. It then moves to describe a critical thread that may be drawn through the stretch of design practice, including its uncertainties, and argues that this criticality is what the design community needs to appreciate and develop. It finally argues that academe needs to modify it’s validity criteria to accommodate critical practice rather than shape practice to fit with current validation models. [Abstract]

Before setting out a sketch of what poetic research may be this paper describes briefly two polar philosophical attitudes to research- one that grounds in methodological rigour and the other that is in the main anti-methodological. The paper then sets aside the notion of these polar attitudes to consider two impulses in work (research/practice)- the centripetal and the centrifugal (drawing on Bakhtin) and sets out the poetic as a co-efficient that conditions the relationship between the two. A metaphorical image, the Reservoir, is then introduced that allows one to map these forces and organise a (re)search in which the active imagination is foregrounded. The reservoir may be used at various points of a programme of creative practice and for different ends- to generate, to build and to analyse. [Abstract]

The Parasitic University critically examines the contemporary problematics of institutional education, pedagogy and higher learning. Primarily focusing on issues related to the access of academic resources in marginalised communities and the redistribution of cultural capital1. I’ve made a historical analysis of the university’s relationship to religion and politics to contextualise my political stance on academia, as well as to give some insight into how I have formulated the concept of the Parasitic University.