Now, please follow me – Eine kritische Designforschung

Critical design is a form of design research in which the designer has a fundamentally critical attitude towards society as well as with regards to his or her own discipline. The resulting design objects are supposed to stimulate reflection and create a critical awareness, but also corresponding changes in current social practices are intended. Critical design is able to solve social problems instead of just aestheticizing or reflecting on them. That this critical attitude is necessary is shown by the designer Susan Karrais on the basis of information graphics in their function of general knowledge transfer. Information is omnipresent, so information graphics are an indispensable instrument to process the flood of data in the contemporary “knowledge society.” The previously often unpopular task among designers has become a real trend in recent years. However, this only rarely led to a real qualitative improvement. Besides the still mostly missing theoretical reference framework, the conventional approach to simplification is the main criticism.

“Now, please follow me – Eine kritische Designforschung” (Eng. Now, please follow me - A critical design research) equally pursues the questions of orientation in the complexity of the world and its representability. In terms of critical design, the goal is not to find solutions but the identification of problems.