Obfuscation / Decontextualization: The Limits of Critical Design

Is current design pedagogy - through its obsessions with styling, the façade, the tyranny of fashion and "the cult of cool" - complicit in hiding suffering that is embedded in designed goods? Is design deeply implicated in rendering whole categories of people and places invisible? Should art and design aesthetics be concerned with justice? Are there ways of making existing social relations and forms of human different more visible? How can we think about the creation of meaning, value and the creation of culture in ways that allow design to be more directly engaged with questions of social and environmental justice? The roundtable will grapple with some of these issues.

https://digitalcommons.risd.edu/critical_futures_symposium/2015/Schedule/4