What is Critical Design?
SOS is not affirmative design. SOS believes in the power of critical design to challenge contemporary comforts and absurdities to reveal new, and sometimes surprising realities. Affirmative design problem solves to maintain society’s injustices; critical design creates problems in order to expose society’s injustice.
Critical design is an approach that allows designers to distance themselves from continuing the status quo, using the power of design to reveal underlying hard realities through politically challenging provocations. Critical design has no single conventional model but always aims to forensically dissect an understanding of the world to uncover new truths through speculation of near futures or evidentiary analysis of past events. We believe design must engage with the narratives that underlie the contemporary quotidien.
Untitled (2017). Katja Novitskova.