SMU_talk.md

There has long been an undercurrent of criticality in present in various aspects of design practice, highly prominent in architecture starting in the 1960’s and enthusiastically kept alive in the distant corners of other fields of design. It is only recently that this criticality has begun to seep into the more popular and public discourses of digital, industrial, service, and product design. This ingress of the political, the inquisitive, and the hypothetical has opened up hybridized spaces between the traditional worlds of fine art and of design. This talk will cover some of the history of critical design and its current relevance, particularly as it relates to constructions of the future and the ways that fictional or aspirational futures shape our understanding of the present.