Critical Fabulations: Reworking the Methods and Margins of Design

A proposal to redefine design in a way that not only challenges the field's 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 field's 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 field's 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 craftwork's contributions to computing innovation--how craftwork becomes hardware manufacturing, and how hardware manufacturing becomes craftwork.

Daniela K. Rosner is Assistant Professor in Human Centered Design and Engineering (HCDE) at the University of Washington, where she codirects HCDE's Tactile and Tactical Design Lab.