CRITICAL BY DESIGN

To radicalize this thought, I will connect this ‘material Enlightenment' to the three questions that make up Immanuel Kant's project of critical philosophy: the questions of ‘what can I know?', ‘ what ought I to do?' and ‘what may I hope for?'. The approach of technological mediation shows that technologies, as designed objects, help us to understand the world, to develop moral frameworks, and to experience limit situations. Not as transcendental conditions but as material mediators. Critical design, then, should invite a critical relation to these mediations. Not from a critical position ‘outside' the realm of mediation, but by developing a limit attitude ‘from within': mediating our relation to mediations. From the perspective of material Enlightenment, critical design is the design of metamediations... If the challenge of design is to invent and institute new forms of technical life, then critical design as a purely speculative design can not meet its cultural challenge. However,..

Primary location: Basel Belgium