Beyond the Design Code: Critical Design and Democratic Rationalizations

This chapter suggests a few touchpoints between Andrew Feenberg’s critical constructivism and current work in critical design, with the hope of initiating a productive dialogue between the two. Taking Feenberg’s notion of the design code as an invitation for such an encounter, the chapter illustrates how designers can take an active, meaningful role in facilitating what Feenberg calls “democratic rationalizations” in three different ways: in (co)design processes designers facilitate collaboration and nurture collective creativity while maintaining as much autonomy for participants to make the design process and its outcomes their own. In (re)design processes designers may be forced to respond to their users’ needs post-hoc, but they may also anticipate users’ needs and even embrace opportunities to provoke users to reflect on the social, cultural and political implications of the technologies they use. Lastly, and most radically, (un)design processes ask designers to let go of (some of) their intentionality and seed potentials for users to appropriate the technologies they design. In Feenberg’s terms, this equals an almost complete relinquishing of “operational autonomy” and the valorization of technical rationality that characterizes it.