
Discursive Design
Critical, Speculative, and Alternative Things
MIT Press
Published on 12. February 2019
Book
Hardback
432 pages
978-0-262-03898-0 (ISBN)
Description
Exploring how design can be used for good-prompting self-reflection, igniting the imagination, and affecting positive social change.Good design provides solutions to problems. It improves our buildings, medical equipment, clothing, and kitchen utensils, among other objects. But what if design could also improve societal problems by prompting positive ideological change? In this book, Bruce and Stephanie Tharp survey recent critical design practices and propose a new, more inclusive field of socially minded practice: discursive design. While many consider good design to be unobtrusive, intuitive, invisible, and undemanding intellectually, discursive design instead targets the intellect, prompting self-reflection and igniting the imagination. Discursive design (derived from "discourse") expands the boundaries of how we can use design-how objects are, in effect, good(s) for thinking. Discursive Design invites us to see objects in a new light, to understand more than their basic form and utility. Beyond the different foci of critical design, speculative design, design fiction, interrogative design, and adversarial design, Bruce and Stephanie Tharp establish a more comprehensive, unifying vision as well as innovative methods. They not only offer social criticism but also explore how objects can, for example, be used by counselors in therapy sessions, by town councils to facilitate a pre-vote discussions, by activists seeking engagement, and by institutions and industry to better understand the values, beliefs, and attitudes of those whom they serve. Discursive design sparks new ways of thinking, and it is only through new thinking that our sociocultural futures can change.
More details
Series
Language
English
Place of publication
Cambridge
United States
Publishing group
MIT Press Ltd
Target group
Interest Age: From 18 years
Product notice
Cloth over boards
Illustrations
311 farbige Abbildungen
311 color illus.
Dimensions
Height: 249 mm
Width: 176 mm
Thickness: 41 mm
ISBN-13
978-0-262-03898-0 (9780262038980)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions

E-Book
02/2019
MIT Press
€48.99
Available for download