The Worst Crit of Your Life
The Worst Crit of Your Life
Sorry for the delay with this month's newsletter, I was waiting for the OK to share an upcoming project I'm working on with you.
As my newsletters over the last year have probably shown, I have increasingly been interested and concerned with the role of designers in the creation of the capitalist context we live in. Hence, I was very excited when I was approached last year by Wolf in Motion to create a web experience that responded to their research into Happiness Centred Design. They argue that current design methodology, such as User-Centred-Design for instance, is too exclusive in its target and too vague in its criteria. As a consequence, it often encourages the design of products and services that focus on providing short-term satisfaction to their users. They propose a system called 'Happiness Centered Design' that calls for designers to think about long term impacts of the things they design and to pay particular attention to non-users, the workers who provide or create the product and of course the environmental impact.
In response to this brief, I created 'The Worst Crit of Your Life'; a playful website that challenges designers, or anyone else who creates things, on the impact of their proposal. Based on the idea of an Art School Crit (a critical review of your work by tutors), website visitors are asked a series of challenging and obtuse questions about the thing they want to put out into the world, by a group of virtual tutors (Illustrated by Santigao Taberna). e.g. 'Does your thing make people overly reliant on you?' or 'Would a younger you be disappointed that you’re working on this?'
My hope is that this website not only gives designers a different perspective on their craft, but might also empower them to challenge their managers about aspects of their project they believe are unethical. Currently, the website is still a little unfinished, so if you see anything wrong with it, please reach out to me. Also feel free to suggest any questions you think we should be adding, the bigger the variety of viewpoints we have the better.
That's all from me this month, thanks for reading and I hope you have a great week,
Fred
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My Website: https://www.fredwordie.com
My Book: https://www.bigdatagirl.com
My VC: https://ventually.xyz