Critical Fabulations

Critical Fabulations Synopsis

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 historicise 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.

Series Overview: The Design Thinking/Design Theory series seeks to develop vital conversations to help designers and researchers serve business, industry, and the public sector for positive social and economic outcomes. This series explores strategic design as an opportunity to create value through innovative products and services. It emphasizes design as service that succeeds through rigorous creativity, critical inquiry, and an ethics informed by respect for people, for nature, and for the world we shape through design.