Just Design. Being Dogmatic about Defining… | by cameron tonkinwise | Medium

Every time you qualify design with, or add design to, some other quality or practice, you are claiming that design does not already do that. All these phrases are redundant and/or appropriative of design: Design Futures, Design Fiction, Speculative Design, Critical Design, Adversarial Design, Discursive Design, Interrogative Design, Design Probes, Ludic Design. Designing that does not already Future, Fiction, Speculate, Criticize, Provoke, Discourse, Interrogate, Probe, Play, is inadequate designing. Not all (commercial) designing does all those things, but it should. Thinking that all these things need to be added to design reinforces the mistaken belief that design is just an instrumental technical task — styling. These qualifiers are precisely what allows (commercial) designing to not (have to) do all those things, or, ironically, constrains (commercial) designing from doing all those things. Calling out all these specialist versions of designing benefits only the artificial ecosyst

Every time you qualify design with, or add design to, some other quality or practice, you are claiming that design does not already do that. All these phrases are redundant and/or appropriative of design: Design Futures, Design Fiction, Speculative Design, Critical Design, Adversarial Design, Discursive Design, Interrogative Design, Design Probes, Ludic Design. Designing that does not already Future, Fiction, Speculate, Criticize, Provoke, Discourse, Interrogate, Probe, Play, is inadequate designing. Not all (commercial) designing does all those things, but it should. Thinking that all these t