Critical Thinking & Experimental Processes

RISD Associate Professor Paolo Cardini's graduate students in Industrial Design share their final projects. Open to the public. 
This event will focus on areas of the design discipline that treat design not as a vocational tool for developing products that solve problems, but rather as a practice of critical inquiry. What does this mean? Historically, Industrial Design has been tightly coupled with industry and commerce, with designers designing functional products that ‘improve peoples’ lives’, and importantly, sell!. Sustainable design, social design and various other approaches within design have tried to make the products of Industrial Design less harmful. However design as critical inquiry is different from all these approaches, in that it attempts to use design to question and reveal the underlying assumptions of the systems in which we operate as designers, but also as citizens, humans, animals. This approach to design is variously known as critical design, speculative design, discursive design. Industrial Design has also traditionally been seen, and presented itself as, a somewhat logical and goal driven process of problem solving. The objects presented and discussed during the event will be turning this aspect of traditional design on its head, and use design as an experimental process, non-goal driven, open ended yet iterative. We can refer to this as Experimental Design. 
Free with admission.