User Feedback: Telling Humorous Stories About Technology and Design

Arguably, design reviews help designers anticipate the future of design-in-the-making. Design reviews are typically known to take place at important points in the design process in commercial design settings, in which the quality and progress of design is discussed. However, critical design and speculative design (Dunne and Raby 2013) can also be seen as types of anticipatory design review, in which often humorous (Malpass 2013) design proposals are used to provoke debate related to the possibilities of new or emerging technologies. In science and technology studies (STS), design is also often “reviewed” in relation to often-unforeseen effects, thus informing our understanding of the social world (Akrich 1992; van Oost 2003). But how might the humorous qualities of critical-speculative design and the descriptive capacities of STS be united? How might we better engage people in discussing our anticipatory design reviews and reports? This techniques workshop explores how scholarly reviews of design might be humorously enlivened to engage people in anticipatory discussions related to design and technology.