“[referring to Dunne & Raby] A key part of D&R’s perspective is the critique of “affirmative design” (e.g. the keeping of the status quo, affirming consumeristic neoliberal attitudes). Another key component, better articulated years later in Speculative Everything, is the idea of producing artifacts that are sitting in our world, yet coming from another, slightly more disturbing one. I also have some issues with characterizing their work as a critique of design and technology: in Hertzian Tales, in Design Noir and in Speculative Everything, they insist on the relationship between society, expectation and design – with the objective of acting on design to reveal how it shapes up society.
There’s a wealth of literature on the (often quite controversial) relationship between D&R and (interaction) design. A key text here is Bardzell, J., Bardzell, S.: What is “Critical” About Critical Design? In: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. pp. 3297–3306. ACM, New York, NY, USA (2013).”

“[when the 1st draft mentioned a straightforward division between Critical Design being “not working objects” and games having “very real mechanics”] There are examples of critical designs that are completely speculative (e.g. the Teddy Bear Blood Bag Radio by D&R), some others that are at an halfway point (e.g. the Pigeor D’Or ), some others that were perfectly realized and functional. An important text on the functionality of critical designs is Pierce, J., Paulos, E.: Counterfunctional Things: Exploring Possibilities in Designing Digital Limitations. In: Proceedings of the 2014 Conference on Designing Interactive Systems. pp. 375–384. ACM, New York, NY, USA (2014). I would frame it as “some designs are ‘speculative’, whereas games are real objects in this world” ”

Reviewer 1 – Wishes to remain anonymous, June 2016.