Critical Fabulations: Reworking the Methods and Margins of Design (Design Thinking Design Theory)

About this book

A proposal to redefine design in a way that not only challenges the fields dominant paradigms but also changes the practice of design itself. In Critical Fabulations Daniela Rosner proposes redefining design as investigative and activist personal and culturally situated responsive and responsible. Challenging the fields dominant paradigms and reinterpreting its history Rosner wants to change the way we historicize the practice reworking it from the inside. Focusing on the development of computational systems she takes on powerful narratives of innovation and technology shaped by the professional expertise that has become integral to the fields mounting status within the new industrial economy. To do so she intervenes in legacies of design expanding what is considered design to include long-silenced narratives of practice and enhancing existing design methodologies based on these rediscovered inheritances. Drawing on discourses of feminist technoscience she examines craftworks contributions to computing innovationhow craftwork becomes hardware manufacturing and how hardware manufacturing becomes craftwork. She reclaims for example NASAs Little Old Ladies the women who built information storage for the Apollo missions by weaving wires through magnetized metal rings. Mixing history theory personal experience and case studies Rosner reweaves fibers of technoscience by slowly reworking the methods and margins of design. She suggests critical fabulations as ways of telling stories that awaken alternative histories and offers a set of techniques and orientations for fabulating its future. Critical Fabulations shows how designs hidden inheritances open different possibilities for practice.