ABSTRACT
This chapter proposes a response to a disagreement about the purpose and its proper subject matter of design criticism, between the professional position that design criticism is useless unless it engages the profession on its own terms, and academic positions which argue for “detooling” design history from design practice and consolidating a proper academic field by clearly defining design criticism’s boundaries. Drawing from the techniques of Bruno Latour, including his (2004) argument that a critic is “not the one who debunks, but the one who assembles,” and recent work on the limits of critique by the literary scholar Rita Felski (2015), the chapter makes a case for a “generative” approach to criticism that attempts to bridge the gulf between the critic and practitioner by acknowledging the desire to reinvent that is shared by both parties. A generative criticism, as outlined, is not that of the detached observer viewing images of design, but one that embraces the socio-material nature of its subject by assembling relational mappings. A generative criticism also validates praxis in its anticipation of ongoing and future cultural shifts affecting the understanding and practice of design.
