Design research paper accepted to conference in Hong Kong

The paper DIFFICULT FORMS: CRITICAL PRACTICES OF DESIGN AND RESEARCH written by Ramia Mazé and Johan Redström has been accepted to the conference 'Emerging Trends in Design Research' that will be held November 12-15 in Hong Kong and organized by the International Association of Societies of Design Research 2007.

Abstract:
As a kind of criticism from within, conceptual and critical design ask questions about what design is about; about how the market operates, what is considered ‘good design’, and how the design and development of technology typically works. Tracing relations of conceptual and critical design to (post-)critical architecture and anti-design, we discuss a series of issues related to the operational and intellectual basis for ‘critical practice’, and how they might open up for a new kind of development of the conceptual and theoretical frameworks of design. Rather than prescribing a practice on the basis of theoretical considerations, these critical practices seem to build an intellectual basis for design on the basis of its own modes of operation, a kind of theoretical development that happens through, and from within, design practice and not by means of external descriptions or analyses of its practices and products.