October 3, 2025

ON THE EDGE OF ART,
DESIGN, AND SPECULATION

Critical Design is not a brand-new concept invented overnight, but rather one that has evolved gradually over the past decades. While critical design as a practice has drawn considerable attention, it has often lacked a comprehensive academic or theoretical grounding. This book is one of the first to offer a systematic overview of the field. Malpass not only explains the fundamentals—how and why critical design emerged, and how it responds to the growing need to rethink design beyond commercial functionality—in a way that is accessible to newcomers, but also provides a reference for practicing designers seeking to challenge assumptions through their work.

One sentence that particularly struck me appears in Chapter 2: “Arguably, it was the marriage of HCI and emerging approaches in product design, which created the field of interaction design.” I encountered this passage at a time when I was questioning what direction to take after graduation. Coming from an interdisciplinary background, I found it difficult to distinguish the wide range of design fields I encountered in school. Until then, my view of design had remained rather shallow, and my understanding of critical design was limited to simply giving critiques of objects. Malpass’s framing opened up this narrow perspective. It helped me recognize why Dunne and Raby’s Faraday Chair stands as such a notable project, and why, in the context of 1998, it mattered to propose a design practice that could operate outside the purely technical and commercially driven logics of product development.

This naturally raised another question: “Isn’t it just art?” In Chapter 1, Malpass references exhibitions such as Wouldn’t It Be Nice… Wishful Thinking in Art and Design at Somerset House, which featured designers including Ryan Gander. Interestingly, Gander was one of the affiliated artists at the Berlin-based gallery where I worked before coming to CMU, and I had always regarded him as firmly situated in the realm of contemporary art rather than design. Because of this experience, Malpass’s argument—that there is a meaningful distinction between art and design, and especially between critical design and conceptual art—felt less persuasive, particularly when read in 2025, nearly eight years after the book’s publication.

Our MA cohort with Professor Jonathan once raised the question of whether art and design can be meaningfully distinguished. Historically, design has been market-driven and tied to the structures of capitalism, while art has often sought to disturb assumptions outside commercial imperatives. Critical design complicates this binary, as overlaps are frequent. However, the most compelling works rarely sit at the center of a single discipline. Instead, they emerge at the edges, interacting across boundaries and borrowing freely from multiple traditions. I found this perspective much more convincing. It not only addressed what I saw as a weakness in Malpass’s explanation but also seemed to better articulate the very intentions behind the book itself.

Another part that captured my interest was its treatment of speculative design. Before reading, I had considered choosing between this book and Speculative Everything by Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby. My classmate’s suggestion convinced me that reading Speculative Everything after this book would be a natural progression. Malpass’s explanation—that speculative design frames situations or problems and informs users about overlooked details, rather than offering practical analysis and solutions—helped me understand why speculative design can be such an eye-opening extension of critical design.

Chapter 4 was perhaps the most demanding part of the book for me, particularly the section on function in critical design practice. The discussion was layered with references and contextual framing that required close attention, and I found it challenging to follow on a first read. Yet it was also the chapter that expanded my thinking the most. It forced me to consider the function of design not merely as physical or utilitarian but as structural, social, and cultural-existential. This was a perspective I had never previously encountered, and though it was difficult, it ultimately broadened my understanding of design’s possibilities in profound ways.

Overall, this book offered me both theoretical clarity and personal encouragement at a moment of uncertainty. For someone without a traditional design background, it illuminated why critical design matters and how it can operate as a bridge between practice, theory, and social imagination. I would like to close with a line from the book, which I find especially relevant in my current context: “Design in academia has the unique opportunity to focus on fundamental, conceptual exploration in ways that are often harder to justify within corporate culture.”

(747 words)

Critical Design in Context: History, Theory, and Practices.
Matt Malpass, London, England: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017, 153 pages.

■ HEEHYEONHAN