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Cultural Geography

USE for: Human geography, Social geography

RELATED TERMS: Geography; Scape metaphors; Anthropo-Scenes

Those parts of the discipline of geography which are of most value to narrative environment design and analysis are cultural geography, human geography or social geography.

According to Merle Patchett (2010), three eras of cultural geography can be identified: the traditional; the new; and the more-than-representational.

Traditional cultural geography is primarily an American field of scholarship, linked closely to the mid-20c work of Carl Sauer. He took the landscape as the defining unit of geographic study. For Sauer, while cultures and societies both developed out of their landscape, they also shaped their landscape. It is this interaction between the ‘natural’ or ‘physical’ landscape and human communities which creates the ‘cultural landscape’. Cultural geographers following this tradition focused on studying the range of human interventions in transforming the ‘natural’ or ‘physical’ landscape. They were most interested in quantifying material culture, such as buildings and architectures, agricultural technologies and other industries.

The 1960s and 1970s saw a quantitative revolution in geography and interest in cultural geography declined as human geographers turned their attention to developing the discipline as a spatial science. However, during the 1980s, the critique of positivism in geography instigated a renewed interest in cultural geography in North America and particularly in the UK.

This ‘new’ cultural geography had different theoretical assumptions, methods and subjects than those of traditional cultural geography. Rather than focusing on material culture, mostly of non-modern and rural societies, the ‘new’ cultural geographers of the 1980s and 1990s examined culture in contemporary and urban societies, and focused primarily on investigating non-material culture, such as, for example, identity, ideology, power, meaning and values. Among the main themes that were incorporated into ‘new’ cultural geography were colonialism and post-colonialism; postmodernism; popular culture and consumption; gender and sexuality; ‘race’, anti- racism and ethnicity; ideology; language; and media. ‘New’ cultural geographers also drew on a diverse set of theoretical traditions, including Marxism, feminism, post-colonial theory, post-structuralism and psychoanalysis.

In turn, this ‘new’ cultural geography, with its emphasis on identity, is challenged by non-representational theory, as formulated by Nigel Thrift. Instead of studying and representing social relationships, non-representational theory focuses upon practices, i.e. how human and nonhuman formations are enacted or performed, not simply on what is produced. This is a post-structuralist theory drawing in part from the works of Michel Foucault, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and phenomenonologists such as Martin Heidegger. However, it also weaves into its rich tapestry the perspectives of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Bruno Latour and Michel Serres. Non-representational theory’s focus upon hybrid formations parallels the conception of ‘hybrid geographies’ developed by Sarah Whatmore, where she prompted cultural geographers to attend to the ‘more-than-human’ geographies in which we live.

It is perhaps this last approach, with its emphasis on hybrid formations, that is of most interest from a narrative environment perspective, although not in the form of abstract accounts of body-practices and phenomenological accounts of ‘being-in-the-world’ but rather in the form of an approach which enables exploration of the interactions between representations, discourses, material entities, spaces and practices, considered as actants and moments of actantiality.

As Patchett notes, given the diversity of approaches available, cultural geography is perhaps best characterised as a living tradition of disagreements, passions, commitments and enthusiasms.

At a general level, Anderson (2009) contends that cultural geography seeks to explore the intersections of context and culture, exploring how cultural activities and contexts interact, influence and perhaps even become synonymous with one another. The product of the intersection between context and culture is identified as place, constituted by imbroglios of traces, i.e. marks, residues or remnants left in place by cultural life. Traces are most commonly considered as material in nature, including buildings, signs, statues, graffiti, in the form of discernible marks on physical surroundings. Nevertheless, they can also be non-material, including, for example, activities, events, performances or emotions.

Traces tie cultures and geographies together, influencing the identity of both. As a consequence of the constant production of traces, places are dynamic entities in fluid states of transition, as new traces react with existing or older ones to change the meaning and identity of the location.

Cultural geography, by interrogating these traces, their interactions, and repercussions, critically appraises the cultural ideas and preferences motivating them, and the reasons for their significance, popularity and effect. Cultural geographers, therefore, Anderson argues, analyse and interrogate all the agents, activities, ideas and contexts that combine together to leave traces in places.

Again, this resonates with how a narrative environment might be understood.

References

Anderson, J. (2009). Understanding cultural geography: places and traces. London, UK: Routledge.

Patchett, M. (2010). What is cultural geography? Experimental Geography in Practice. Available from https://merlepatchett.wordpress.com/2010/09/03/cultural-geography/ [Accessed 2 September 2016].

Global Challenges – Learning

Jean Dubuffet, La ronde des images, 1977

According to Nicholas Maxwell (2021), humanity is confronted by two great challenges of learning:

learning about the universe; and about ourselves and other living things as a part of the universe; and
learning how to create civilisation.

The first challenge, Maxwell contends, has been addressed by modern science and technology from the 17th century onwards. The second, how to create civilisation, remains problematic.

[Paraphrasing Maxwell’s challenges in terms of the debates ongoing within European philosophy and as applied in this website to design practices, it might be said that ‘creating civilisation’ is similar to, if not equivalent to, the task of ‘world-building’, in its socio-technical, socio-cultural, socio-economc and socio-ecological dimensions, in which design takes up both material and strategic roles. The question of how world-building relates to the Earth systems (or planetary or global systems) in which it takes place, both in harmony and in disharmony, might be a way of paraphrasing Maxwell’s first challenge – learning about the universe and our (changing, evolving?) place within it.

The challenges are inter-related. They may be posed as the challenge of how to formulate and understand the relationship between socio-genesis (development of civilisation) and techno-genesis (technological development). They both seem to precede each other: techno-genesis arrives through socio-genesis; and socio-genesis arrives through techno-genesis.

This brings to attention the socio-technical character of the human, at once animal-social, governed by a milieu that is ecosystemic, and machinic-technical, governed by a milieu that is economic. The animal-human-machinic ternary seems to open a path to a bio-techno-logic, a form of logic that must, but possibly cannot, reflexively take into account its own complex co-genesis. This is because, as a metaphor, it fails to acknowledge that the bio- and the socio- themselves arise from the eco- and that the eco-, perceived through a technical economy, is always mis-recognised because incomprehensible (cannot be wholly encompassed) within technical, economic terms. Clashes of civilisations are expressed as clashes of technologies in the form of weapons.

Maxwell (2021) acknowledges this duality and/or co-determination of the human when he says that,

“In order to promote human welfare, the problems we fundamentally need to solve are problems we encounter in life, problems of suffering, injustice, avoidable death. These are problems solved by action, by what we do, or refrain from doing. When knowledge or technological know-how is required, as it is in medicine or agriculture, it is always what this knowledge or technology enables us to do that solves the problem [address the challenge, AP], not the knowledge or technology as such. Thus, a kind of inquiry that helps promote human welfare rationally would give intellectual priority to the tasks of (a) articulating, and improving the articulation, of the problems of living [challenges of living, AP] to be solved, and (b) proposing and critically assessing possible solutions [possible responses, AP] — possible actions, policies, political programmes, philosophies of life, ways of living. Solving problems of knowledge and technology [proposing responses to epistemological and technical challenges, AP] would be important, but secondary. But knowledge-inquiry, in giving priority to problems of knowledge [epistemological challenges, AP], violates both (a) and (b). The two most basic rules of reason are violated, in a structural way.”

For Maxwell, modern universities, by prioritising knowledge creation and acquisition, fail to give priority to helping humanity solve challenges of living and thereby also fail to help the public improve its understanding of what our challenges are, and what we need to do about them.

Challenges of a socio-genetic character, because they necessarily imply techno-genetic challenges, are, or become, design issues. However, as is argued in this website, design practices are not solely or primarily problem solving. Perhaps the position could be stated in the following way: ‘wicked problems’ as ‘wicked challenges’, as that which design addresses, are more than simply problems; they relate to ways of living. Design, in one sense, then, seeks to intervene so as to prevent or avert ‘wicked challenges’ from arising, by proposing and enacting, for example, ways of living that seem to pre-empt certain kinds of suffering, particular injustices and avoidable deaths.

A ‘design practice’ orientation, articulated through explicit design pedagogies, within the university may therefore assist in shifting the academy away from its knowledge-creation priorities towards addressing the pressing eco-socio-cultural-techno-systemic matters, which Maxwell characterises as the creation of civilisation. Those civilisational priorities although woven through the practices of modern science and technology are often not prioritised by dominant techno-scientific practices and institutions, geared as they often are to weapons development in international power politics and to the development of instruments which facilitate the domination of ‘nature’ or Erath systems.

References

Maxwell, N. (2021) How universities have betrayed reason and humanity – and what’s to be done about it, Frontiers in Sustainability, Available at https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/frsus.2021.631631/full [Accessed 22 August 2021]

Global Challenges

“Yet here’s a spot.” Lady Macbeth, Act 5, Scene 1, *The Tragedy of Macbeth*, cited in Joyce, *Ulysses,* p.18

“We are confronted in the twenty-first century with an array of serious problems but among them two immense challenges stand out: on the one hand, those problems presented by carbon technologies, and, on the other hand, those posed by silicon technologies.” (Daniel Ross, 2019)

In the philosophy of design emerging (incompletely) in these web pages, design practices are not defined primarily in terms of their ‘problem-solving’ capabilities. Rather, they are considered as provisional responses to challenges of different kinds and orders, many of which are deemed ‘wicked’ in character. These responses, then, while far from necessarily providing ‘solutions’, nevertheless address the challenges in substantive ways.

In doing so, they may alleviate some of the stresses within the challenge but they may also change the character of the challenge which remains, albeit in altered form, and which calls for further design responses. Some of these further responses may address the remaining stresses of the initial challenge. Others may address the novel challenges raised by the design response in a world that remains pervaded by challenges and is increasingly defined by the remnants of prior design responses to those challenges which evolve over time. The legacies of some of these designed responses, given the changing terrain, may turn into explicit obstacles rather than having the character of remaining a ‘solution’ to a past challenge.

The question of what design practices and designs ‘do’ is framed by this schema, as a theorised ‘context’ for designing, a context which incorporates relevant design responses to ongoing challenges and the remnants of past design responses that now operate as obstacles to, or misdirections for, emergent designing.

Since theorising and philosophising tend to operate using generalities (part of their limitations as design practices), which are no longer easily discussed as ‘universals’ due to the perceived limitations of European thinking particularly in its historical development in defining a ‘modern’ anthropo-Eurocentric world, discussion of the challenges to which designing may respond have tended to take the form of the outlining the tensions between ‘man’ (the human) and ‘world’ (the natural).

This ‘general’, ‘universal’ or ‘global’ perspective was seldom in the past adopted in (professional) design practices as the horizon in which designers perceived themselves to operate. However, design practices themselves have expanded to incorporate wider horizons through the development of such fields as participatory design, ecological design and design as policy-making. Nevertheless, a ‘gap’ or an ‘aporia’ remains between ‘design thinking’ and ‘thinking about global challenges’.

To illustrate this ‘aporia’, let us take, for example, a number of global challenges identified by Bernard Stiegler, as outlined by Daniel Ross (2018: 11) in the Introduction to the English translation of Neganthropocene. They are:

the rise of online social networks;
the growth of the ubiquitous interactive screen;
the global financial crisis as symptomatic of the tendency of investment to become increasingly short-term and speculative;
the proliferation of geopolitical crises, terrorism and related forms of individual and collective ‘acting out’;
automation as a threat to a consumerist macro-economic system founded on employment-based purchasing power;
the Anthropocene as an ‘existential threat’ to human existence and the biosphere; and
the unravelling of the consequences of industrially-generated populism, including the entrance into a so-called ‘post-truth’ age where alternative facts proliferate.

Ross and Stiegler in this listing are taking up an explicitly, even if ‘critical’, ‘Western’ or anthropo-Eurocentric positioning in relation to ‘the human’ and ‘the world’. Kevin Rudd similarly specifies a number of global policy domains or global change-drivers which pose significant challenges for the world. However, Rudd’s perspective seeks to understand China’s evolving role in these domains. Rudd cites:

China as a powerful global economic actor (geo-economic challenges)
the world after the collapse of the Soviet Union (geo-political challenges)
the ongoing digital revolution (emerging, disruptive technological challenges)
climate change (environmental challenges exacerbated by anthropocentric action)
demographic change (the challenges of human groupings and of being-human)

These positionalities, as any other, seek to determine an abstract ‘universality’ of the condition of ‘the world’, but the question remains of the ‘for whom’ these issues are ‘challenges’ to be met.

Each of these challenges or policy domains might be defined as wicked’ or, indeed, as aspects of one great entangled ‘wicked challenge’, that of how to sustain human existence in the world or how to sustain the world grasped through the lens of ‘being-human’: the ‘world-as-human’. Are ‘world’ and ‘human’ permanently and inevitably at odds or are they part of an ongoing ‘evolutionary dialogue’ in which neither is, or can be, ‘aware’?

Professional design practices may be drawn upon to address aspects of these challenges through their employment by government, in explicit or implicit policy-making and policy implementation, or by business and industry, both in their traditional roles in design for production and in design for consumption. The academic disciplines around teaching and research on designing remains largely associated with professional development for operation within these two major contexts.

The question remains as to whether there is any other role designing (un-professionally, un-disciplinedly) can play in bringing to attention the limits of designing’s own deployment in addressing the ‘global’ challenges in which design practices play, contradictorily, both a minor and a major part. Does designing have a significant part to play, in its participatory forms, in what used to be called ‘civil society’ and in those institutions that are defined as non-governmental and charitable. The problem of the ‘humanitarian’ remains tied up in the complex consequences of the Post-World War Two settlement and the bases of a rights-based system which claims an abstract universality but practices concrete differentiations.

Even if there is such a space for designing, in this context, practices of designing will remain ‘compromised’, their goals necessarily always incomplete, as they must engage with their own pasts and the ongoing challenges with which they must become engaged and through which they must re-define or un-design themselves and the residual world in which we (individuals, citizens, consumers, workers?), or rather we-they, reside.

Reference

Joyce, J. (2000) Ulysses [with an introduction by Declan Kiberd]. London, UK: Penguin Books.

Ross, D. (2018) Introduction. In Stiegler, B. (2018) The Neganthropocene. London, UK: Open Humanities Press, pp.7-32.

Ross, D. (2019) Carbon and silicon: contribution to a critique of political economy. Available at https://internation.world/arguments-on-transition/chapter-10/

Rudd, K. (2024) On Xi Jinping: How X’s Marxist nationalism is shaping China and the world. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.

World-as-Milieu

RELATED TERMS: World; World Building

Bernard Stiegler, in contemplating the mode of existence of the noetic soul, in other words, the (human) psychic apparatus, is led to consider what is its milieu. Ross (2018: 16) explains that, at first, Stiegler thought it must be language. However, further contemplation made him realise that it is the exteriorised milieu in general, the realm of technics: artefacts, technical artefacts and environmental systems.

In the absence of the exterior milieu, the psychic apparatus consists in nothing but anamnesic memories interwoven with the hypomnesic traces left by those artefacts which form, “an artificial memory and projective mechanism that would serve only to demonstrate, above all, the irreducibility of the exterior.” (Ross, 2018: 16)

As Stiegler (2018: 37) expresses it, “the artefact is the mainspring of hominization, its condition and its fate.”

References

Ross, D. (2018) Introduction. In Stiegler, B. The Neganthropocene. London, UK: Open Humanities Press, pp. 7-32.

Stiegler, B. (2018) The Neganthropocene. London, UK: Open Humanities Press

Wicked Problems – Wicked Challenges

The underlying thesis that is at stake here is that the world, which is conceptualised as a complex narrative environment, a constructed model of reality, is enfolded in a number of wicked challenges, such as those discussed in the post Global Challenges. Design practices, given appropriately developed methodologies and research paradigms, are valid means for addressing but, crucially, not ‘solving’ these complex, inter-related challenges.

Richard Buchanan (1992) revived the discussion of wicked problems and the potential role of design in addressing them by combining the theories of Horst Rittel and Melvin Webber (1973) and Herbert Simon (1973, 1996) with the practice of Ezio Manzini (Gerber, 2018). Rittel and Webber called such problems ‘wicked’, not because they are themselves ethically deplorable but, “in a meaning akin to that of “malignant” (in contrast to “benign”) or “vicious” (like a circle) or “tricky” (like a leprechaun) or “aggressive” (like a lion …).”

Wicked problems, then, are unique problems for which there is no definite formulation, as stakeholders cannot agree on a single definition; proposed solutions are not true-or-false but better or worse; and solutions are numerous and, when implemented, change the way to formulate the (ongoing) problem (Rittel and Webber 1973). In short, wicked problems are about people, vested interests and politics. (Ritchey 2013).

Dubberly and Pangaro (2015) note that, “wicked problems … are essentially political in nature and cannot be “solved” by experts,” while Silvio Lorusso (2023) states, “Every problem is a wicked problem: its resolution is temporary, its paradigm ever-shifting, its focus evolving.”

To cut a long story short, perhaps illegitimately: design is part of an ongoing political conversation about the values that are articulated in social practices that define social goals and which give rise to wicked challenges.

Design Practices and Wicked Challenges

Farrell and Hooker (2013) argue that design is not distinguished from science by characteristically being faced with wicked problems while science deals with ‘tame’ problems (‘puzzle solving’). Rather, they suggest, the features that Rittel and Weber hold to be characteristic of wicked problems derive from three general sources. These sources are common both to science and to design. They are:

agent finitude, that is, capacity limitations, such as emergencies of time, cognitive limitations and so on;
complexity, that is, uncertainty and irreversibility embedded in the complex-systems nature of the world; and
normativity, referring to human values and norms (Pietrzyk, 2022). They play analogous roles in both science and design.

Furthermore, as Farrell and Hooker (2013) make clear, a challenge (or a ‘problem domain’) is neither all fully tame or all fully wicked. The tame/wicked distinction contains a number of different features each of which varies in its degree of tameness and wickedness across challenges.

References

Buchanan, R. (1992) Wicked problems thinking in design, Design Issues, 8 (2), p. Page 5-21. Available at: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1511637 (Accessed: 2 May 2019).

Dubberly, H. and Pangaro, P. (2015) How cybernetics connects computing, counterculture, and design, in Blauvelt, A. (ed.) Hippie modernism: the struggle for utopia. Minneapolis, MN: Walker Art Center, pp. 126–141.

Farrell, R. and Hooker, C. (2013) Design, science and wicked problems, Design Studies, 34(6), pp. 681–705. doi: 10.1016/j.destud.2013.05.001.

Gerber, N. (2018) A Critical review of design thinking. Medium. Available at https://medium.com/@niklausgerber/a-critical-review-of-design-thinking-44d8aed89e90 [Accessed 9 September 2021]

Lorusso, S. (2023) What design can’t do: essays on design and disillusion. Eindhoven, NL: Set Margins.

Manzini, E. (2015) Design, when everybody designs: An introduction to design for social innovation. Translated by R. Coad. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Pietrzyk, K. (2022) Wicked problems in architectural research: The Role of research by design, ARENA Journal of Architectural Research, 7(1), pp. 1–16. doi: 10.5334/ajar.296.

Ritchey, T. (2013) Wicked problems: Modelling social messes with morphological analysis, Acta Morphologica Generalis, 2(1), pp. 1–8.

Rittel, H. W. J. and Webber, M. M. (1973) Dilemmas in a general theory of planning, Policy Sciences, 4 (2), pp. 155–169. Available at: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4531523 (Accessed: 15 August 2021).

Simon, H. A. (1973) The structure of ill structured problems, Artificial Intelligence, 4(3–4), pp. 181–201. doi: 10.1016/0004-3702(73)90011-8.

Simon, H. (1996) The Sciences of the artificial. 3rd edn. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Further Reading

Crilly, N. (2025) Wicked problems: Flexible characterizations and visual representations, She Ji, 11(1), pp. 31–60. doi: 10.1016/j.sheji.2025.01.002.

Design Thinking

RELATED TERMS:

Design thinking is a human-centric approach to assist businesses to improve their existing products and generate new ideas about possible products and services. It is a creative approach to problem solving. Although not invented by IDEO, it has come to be closely associated with the five-step method developed by that design practice. An evolving approach, its five steps were initially formalised as: Empathise, Define, Ideate, Prototype and Test.

The three criteria applied to determining whether a design is possible are: desirability, from a human point of view; feasibility from a technological perspective; and viability, from an economic perspective. Its key values, therefore, relate to: the human, technology and economy. In the words of Tim Brown, CEO and president of IDEO, a key figure associated with design thinking, it is an “approach to innovation that draws from the designer’s toolkit to integrate the needs of people, the possibilities of technology, and the requirements for business success.”

Note that the design of narrative environments, in orienting itself towards the values of human, narrative and environment, takes the position that design is not simply or narrowly defined as a problem solving process. Rather the outputs of design practices are situated responses to wicked challenges. While they make interventions into those challenges they cannot be said to ‘solve’ them ‘finally’. Rather, they alter the situation, perhaps making improvements but perhaps also raising other challenges in the process.

References

Brown, T. (2008) Design thinking, Harvard Business Review, 86(6), pp. 85–92. Available at https://new-ideo-com.s3.amazonaws.com/assets/files/pdfs/IDEO_HBR_DT_08.pdf [Accessed 15 September 2021]

Di Russo, S. (2016) Understanding the behaviour of design thinking in complex environments [PhD thesis]. Swinburne University of Technology. Available at: https://figshare.swinburne.edu.au/articles/thesis/Understanding_the_behaviour_of_design_thinking_in_complex_environments/26292853?file=47659087 (Accessed: 19 July 2025).

Feminist Avant-Garde Art Practices

RELATED TERMS: Avant-garde movements; Feminism – Material feminism

While themes derived from avant-garde art practice may be of relevance to design practices, of potentially more interest may be those practices of the feminist avant-garde. In confronting an oppressive and conformist patriarchal system prevalent in the in the immediate post-World War Two years, feminist artists developed work that challenged the cult of masculine artistic genius while reclaiming lost ground in the public sphere. They used the media of photography, film, video, and action/performance to explore the female body as a work of art that challenged the ascendancy of the male gaze.

They examined the personal as the political by undermining stereotypical roles as housewife, mother and wife, symbolically enacting the act of breaking free from oppressive confinement while re-articulating the iconography of female eroticism and sexuality, in the process critiquing the reification of the female body while engaging in role play. Through these experimental performances, feminist women artists analysed the dynamics of the perceiving/perceived gendered body considering how, as Schor (2015: 61) argues, women experience a split consciousness: as they internalise the male gaze, they simultaneously perceive themselves as subjects and as objects. A significant part of this perceptual domain involves the critique of the ideal of (feminine) beauty and its dictates as well as highlighting the violence inflicted on women.

Gabriele Schor (2015) argues that the historiography of modern art, in adhering too faithfully to the discursive paradigm of male artistic genius, does a serious disservice to the contribution made by women artists. Women artists played a significant part in the classical avant-gardes, whose protagonists sought to break free from tradition and win social acceptance for a new art. These avant-gardes produced their manifestos, pamphlets and art works during the first third of the 20th century, before and after the First World War, until they were suppressed by fascist and Stalinist forces in Europe.

Peter Burger (1974) adjudged that the avant-garde had failed, a contention that is disputed by Karin Hirdina. Hirdina thinks that the demise of the avant-garde was not a simple endogenous failure but owed more to the fact of their being suppressed. Nevertheless, those representatives of the historic avant-garde who survived exile and oppression could not simply pick up where they left off in the 1920s.

The sense of the term avant-garde changed after World War Two, a period in which it came to cover such art practices as action painting, abstract expressionism, minimalism, op art, pop art, Situationism, Fluxus, Happenings and conceptual art. One of the most striking tendencies in art at this time was the feminist art movement. However, such feminist art is generally not identified as being part of the neo-avant-garde.

This inability to perceive the proximity of ‘feminism’ and ‘avant-garde’ is a weakness of both art history and art criticism. Schor (2015) clearly delineates the feminist art movement’s historic and pioneering achievements, focusing on the art produced during the 1970s. The activities of these women artists manifest all the characteristics of the avant-garde, a concept too closely connected with male artists.

References

Burger, P. (1984). Theory of the avant-garde, translated by Michael Shaw. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

Schor, G. et al. (2015). Feminist avant-garde: art of the 1970s, the Sammlung Verbund Collection, Vienna. München: Prestel

Video resources

Rebel Women: The Great Art Fight Back, 22:30 18/06/2018, BBC4, 60 mins. Available from https://learningonscreen.ac.uk/ondemand/index.php/prog/1172DA83?bcast=126923343 [Accessed 10 Mar 2019]

Critical Thinking

Critical thinking in the West can be traced back back to the Socratic-Platonic tradition, with Plato formalising the Socratic critique of received opinions into a distinction between knowledge, in the form of episteme, and doxa, in the form of belief. This serves as the basis for distinguishing the elevated position of the philosopher, as having epistemic knowledge, from the common man, who has only doxic belief (Biesta and Stams, 2001).

However, Biesta and Stams insist, it is Kant’s three Critiques which remain, for the contemporary 21st century reader, a major attempt to articulate what it could mean for a philosophy to be critical. Kant also provided an explicit argument for linking critique and education. Judith Butler (2009: 775) contends that Kant extended the scope of critique yet further, arguing that while critique arrives at its modern formulation within philosophy, it also makes claims that exceed the particular disciplinary domain of the philosophical. In Kant, Butler states, critique operates not only outside of philosophy and in the university more generally but is also a way of calling into question the legitimating grounds of various public and governmental agencies.

The term ‘critical theory‘, which develops within the same conceptual frame, has a narrower scope, however, referring to the thought of several generations of scholars within the Frankfurt School.

What is particular interest in the context of narrative environment design is the relationship between critical thinking and creative thinking. Thinking about the relationship between the critical and the creative can be assisted by considering the thought of Bruno Latour and Jacques Derrida, amongst others, who consider what has been called a ‘crisis of the critical’.

Latour, for example, starting from a materialist anthropological perspective, sees critical thinking as a ‘modern’ conception based on the separation of the subject (critic) from the object (the criticised), as in Cartesian-derived dualistic thinking. Contemporary problems, Latour argues, require overcoming this dualism by recognising the implication of the critic in the problematique, not standing apart from it, and as part of the constitution of the ‘object’, ‘subject’ and the ongoing situation in which they are inter-related.

Derrida similarly, but with a very different style derived from philosophical discourse, questions the binary assumptions concerning the ground upon which the critic stands, arguing that this cannot be simply outside or above, in the sense of ‘exterior and ‘transcendental’, but rather must remain on a level with that with which there is a critical engagement. The critical engagement is both an intervention, or event, and an invention, or creation, for Derrida.

References

Biesta, G. and Stams, G.J.J.M. (2001). Critical thinking and the question of critique: some lessons from deconstruction. Studies in Philosophy and Education, 20 (1), 57–74.

Butler, J. (2009). Critique, dissent, disciplinarity. Critical Inquiry, 35, 773–795.

Critical Theory

Design requires critical thinking and creative thinking, but does it need critical theory, in the more narrow sense?

Bohman (2005) explains that critical theory in the narrow sense designates several generations of German philosophers and social theorists in the Western European Marxist tradition known as the Frankfurt School. In traditional approaches, Max Horkheimer argues, the general goal of all theory is a universal systematic science, not limited to any particular subject matter but embracing all possible objects. However, for Horkheimer, a ‘critical’ theory may be distinguished from a ‘traditional’ theory on the basis of a specific practical purpose: a theory is critical to the extent that it seeks human emancipation, acts as a liberating influence, and serves to create a world in which human needs and powers are satisfied (Horkheimer, 2002).

Source: https://www.marxists.org/subject/frankfurt-school/

As Horkheimer defines it, critical theory never aims simply at an increase of knowledge as such. Rather, critical theory is adequate only if it meets three criteria: it must be explanatory, practical, and normative, at once (Bohman, 2005). Thus, it must explain what is considered to be problematic with current social reality and in what ways it is a problem; identify the actors to address it and change it; and provide both clear norms for criticism and achievable practical goals for social transformation.

For Horkheimer, a capitalist society could be transformed only by becoming more democratic, such that the conditions of social life that are controllable by human beings depend on real consensus in a rational society. The normative orientation of critical theory, as critical social inquiry, is towards the transformation of capitalism into a real democracy in which such control could be exercised. In such formulations, there are striking similarities between critical theory and American pragmatism.

Critical theories are forms of knowledge which, as Raymond Guess writes in The Idea of Critical Theory ,differ from theories in the natural sciences because they are ‘reflective’ rather than ‘objectifying’, that is to say, they take into account their own procedures and methods. Critical theories aim neither to prove a hypothesis nor prescribe a particular methodology or solution to a problem. Rather, in differing ways, critical theorists offer self-reflective modes of thought that seek to change the world, or at least the world in which the inequalities of market capitalism, as well as patriarchal and colonial, or post-colonial, interests, still prevail.

Thus, the term ‘critical theory’ can be extended, as Jane Rendell suggests, to include the work of later theorists, such as those included under the labels of poststructuralism, postcolonialism, feminism and others, whose thinking is also self-critical and seeks to effect social change. This kind of theoretical work provides the opportunity not only to reflect on existing conditions, but also to imagine something different, to transform rather than simply describe them. More importantly, Rendell argues, it is possible to extend the ‘critical’ as defined through critical theory into practice, to include critical practices, i.e. those practices that involve social critique, self-reflection and social change.

References

Bohman, J. (2005). Critical theory. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Available from http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/critical-theory/ [Accessed 24 February 2016].

Horkheimer, M. (2002). Traditional and critical theory. In: Critical Theory: Selected Essays. New York, NY: Continuum, 188-252.

Rendell, J. (2007). Critical spatial practice. Jane Rendell [Website]. Available from http://www.janerendell.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2009/06/critical-spatial-practice.pdf [Accessed 12 March 2016].

Creative Thinking

“Above all, and very familiar by now, is the view that critical and creative writing have become one and are indistinguishable.”
(Brooke-Rose, 1991: 19)

While a design may serve a critical purpose, it does so creatively, so to speak. Designing, therefore, involves both creative and critical thinking.

The relationship between critical and creative thinking continues to generate debate. While some theorists view critical thinking and creative thinking as distinct but complementary, others believe that they are opposites. For those who view them as opposites, the assumption is that the generation of new ideas requires the abandonment of the logic and criteria of assessment that characterise critical thinking (Bailin and Siegel, 2002: 186).

From this dualist perspective, it is also assumed that critical thinking is strictly analytic and evaluative, an algorithmic process that consists in arriving at the correct evaluations of ideas, arguments, or products. In this view, critical thinking is categorised as noncreative, a mechanical process of following existing rules, and for that reason unable to transcend frameworks or result in new ideas (Bailin and Siegel, 2002: 186).

Again, in this dichotomous view, creative thinking is seen as solely generative, allowing for the breaking of rules, the transcending of frameworks, and the creation of novel outcomes. In this view, creative thinking is considered to be noncritical, since criticism must take place according to prevailing criteria while being creative involves violating these criteria.

Nevertheless, while it is often assumed that they are two different and distinct kinds of thinking, critical thinking and creative thinking need not necessarily be viewed as opposites: there are evaluative, analytic, logical aspects to creating new ideas or products and there is an imaginative, constructive dimension to their assessment. A conceptualisation that proposes two distinct types of thinking, critical and creative, is seriously problematic.

To a large extent, it might be argued, critical and creative thinking overlap. Indeed, it may be the direction in which such thinking is taken or is developed, or the frame/context in which such thinking is developed, that distinguishes them.

According to Gray and Malins (2004: 39), critical thinking involves thinking about thinking, or ‘meta-thinking’, which concerns considering where one, as thinker, stands within such thinking and in relation to such thinking.

One stands in relation to that thinking as a member of an ‘objective’ speech, thinking or discourse community, applying various standards of ‘logic’, reason or rationality. It is not simply ‘my thinking’ but any one’s thinking according to generally accepted terms, rules and methods.

One stands within that thinking, however, through an emotive or affective attachment to it, as one’s own thinking, ‘my thoughts’, ‘my way of thinking’, implying belief, adherence and affiliation, beyond mere rule-following.

Thus, for Gray and Malins (2004: 39), critical thinking is equivalent to creative thinking in as far as: it encourages questioning why something is the case; it requires imagining ‘what if’ something were the case or proceeding ‘as if’ something were the case, i.e. speculation about conditionality and consequence and/or inconsequence; it involves speculative connecting in linking elements that have not been considered in relation to one another before; it involves interpreting possible meanings; and it encourages applying ideas and methods to particular situations and experimenting with novel configurations. It might be added here that critical thinking requires acceptance of chance, accidence or emergence (unanticipated consequences, from unconsidered aspects of conditionality).

In a research context, Gray and Malins (2004: 39) suggest, critical thinking is essential for developing a convincing research proposition, i.e. an argument, in relation to what already exists in the field of study, in order to make a creative contribution to that field.

An argument, Gray and Malins continue, is a process of reasoning in which one attempts to influence someone’s belief that what one is proposing is the case, to convince others of the validity of how you see the world and convince others that they, too, can and should see it the way you do. However, this process itself should be open to the possibility of what cannot be foreseen, predicted and calculated as a possibility, i.e. to the surprise of the invention of the other (Applebaum, 2011) whom you are trying to convince.

Another way of understanding the relationship between critical and creative thinking is suggested by Karen Barad through her notion of diffraction, itself borrowed from Donna Haraway. Barad (2014: 186n) contrasts her diffractive analysis with that of critique, or at least some forms of critique. Diffraction takes its lead from forms of critical analysis, such as those put forward by Marx, Nietzsche and Foucault. Both critique and diffractive analysis take account of the material-discursive conditions of possibility in their historical-social-political-naturalcultural contingency.

However, Barad argues, whereas critique operates in a mode of disclosure, exposure and demystification, diffraction might be understood as a form of affirmative engagement. Diffraction is an iterative practice of intra-actively reworking and being reworked by patterns of mattering. A diffractive methodology seeks to work constructively and deconstructively, but not destructively, to make new patterns of understanding-becoming.

Bruno Latour (2004) develops a separate but related line of argumentation to Barad when he considers what has become of the critical spirit. He points out that it has been a long time since intellectuals were in the vanguard and a very long time since the notions of a proletarian avant-garde and an artistic avant-garde passed away. It is still possible to go through the motions of a critical avant-garde, but the animating spirit or drive has gone, Latour suggests.

If the critical mind is to renew itself, Latour argues, it has to cultivate a stubbornly realist attitude, but a realism that deals with matters of concern, i.e. ‘actual occasions’ or ‘actual situations’ or ‘actual occurrences’, and not matters of fact. The mistake, Latour contends, is to accept too uncritically what matters of fact are, and to think that the most effective way to criticise them is to focus on the conditions that make them possible, as in the Kantian and subsequent critical attitude. [seeing them as constructed; relation to constructivism?]

Such a refusal, i.e. refusing to accept uncritically what matters of fact are and to equate critique with the Kantian move to conditions of possibility, makes it possible to recognise that reality is not defined by matters of fact; and that matters of fact are not all that is given to experience. Matters of fact are not only partial but are also polemical. They are renderings of matters of concern, a subset of states of affairs.

Latour outlines this return to realism in the following way. Enlightenment thinking developed matters of cat as a powerful descriptive tool for debunking prevailing beliefs, powers and illusions. However, this Enlightenment thinking found itself disarmed when matters of fact were submitted to this same process of debunking.

Following Donna Haraway, Latour suggests that one way out of this impasse is to devise or design another powerful tool which focuses on matters of concern and whose impulse is no longer simply to debunk but rather to protect and to care. The critical urge is thereby transformed into an ethos by means of which reality is added to matters of fact rather than subtracted.

Critique is useless when it begins to use the results of one science or domain of knowledge uncritically, i.e. takes them as foundational, inalienable matters of fact. Nevertheless, to retrieve a realist attitude, it is not enough to disseminate the critical weapons uncritically created by previous generations. The split in the realist attitude, embodying a “bifurcation of nature”, as Alfred North Whitehead calls it, must be repaired, so that it no longer continues to be the case that matters of fact take the best or main part, i.e. the substance or substrate, while matters of concern are limited to a rich but void or irrelevant history, accidence or contingency. For Whitehead, it is events (‘actual occasions’ ) which are, in some sense, the ultimate ‘substance’ of nature.

For Latour, Whitehead is the philosopher who can effect this repair. Whitehead considers matters of fact to be poor renderings of what is given in experience that muddle the question. Thus, as Latour explains it, Whitehead does not take the path of critique, which directs attention away from facts, as is done in the critical attitude, but instead digs further into the realist attitude, which recognises that matters of fact are implausible, unrealistic, unjustified definitions of what it is to deal with matter, i.e. the matter at hand, material practices and the material world as ‘actual occasions’.

Thus, for Latour, Whitehead avoids the distractions that are pursuant upon taking the path of the critical attitude, for example, in the Kantian direction, which emphasises the conditions of possibility of facts, the Husserlian direction, which adds flesh to the bare bones of the facts, or the Heideggerian direction, which seeks to avoid as much as possible the fate of the domination of facts or the framing (Gestell) by facts.

Thus, Latour (2004: 245) quotes Whitehead (2006: 20) as saying that, “ … matter represents the refusal to think away spatial and temporal characteristics and to arrive at the bare concept of an individual entity.”

[From a design perspective, this operates as a refusal to think away the environmental (spatial) and the narrative (temporal) characteristics of an ‘actual situation’.]

Given this Whiteheadian insight, Latour argues, it is not the case that there exist solid matters of fact after which it is then for us to decide whether they will be used to explain something. Furthermore, it is not the case either that the other solution is to attack, criticise, expose or historicise those matters of fact in order to show that they are made-up, interpreted, flexible. Nor is ti the case that we should flee out of them into the mind; or add to them symbolic and cultural dimensions.

Rather, it should be clearly recognised that matters of fact are a poor proxy of experience and experimentation. Moreover, matters of fact are a confusing bundle of polemics, epistemology and modernist politics that cannot claim to represent what is required of a realist attitude.

The direction a new critical attitude might take is that of a multifarious inquiry, using a range of tools from different disciplines, in order to detect how many participants are gathered in an occasion or situation or occurrence (i.e. a “thing” in the Heideggerian sense of ‘a gathering’) to bring it into existence and sustain its existence.

By this means, the critic, rather than being one who debunks, is one who assembles; one who offers participants arenas in which to gather, rather than pulling the rug from under the feet of naive believers; one for whom, if something is constructed (designed, artifactual or artificial) it means that it is fragile and is in great need of care and caution, not one who alternates between anti-fetishism and positivism.

The practical problem this generates is to associate the word criticism with a whole set of new positive metaphors, gestures, attitudes, reactions and habits of thought, such that critique is associated with more, not less, with addition, not subtraction, and with multiplication, not division, generating more ideas than have been received.

This would require that all entities cease to be objects defined by their inputs and outputs and become again “things’, mediating, assembling and enfolding.

References

Applebaum, B. (2011). Critique of critique: on suspending judgment and making judgment. In: Philosophy of Education Yearbook, 55–64.

Bailin, S. and Siegel, H. (2002). Critical thinking. In Blake, N. et al., eds. (2003). The Blackwell guide to the philosophy of education. Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishing.

Barad, K. (2014). Diffracting diffraction: cutting together-apart. Parallax, 20 (3), pp.168–187. Available at: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13534645.2014.927623 [Accessed July 15, 2014].

Gray, C. and Malins, J. (2004). Visualizing research: a guide to the research process in art and design. Aldershot, Hants.: Ashgate.

Latour, B. (2004). Why has critique run out of steam? From matters of fact to matters of concern. Critical Inquiry, 30 (2), 225–248.

Parsons, A. (2015, 15 December). Critical thinking, creative thinking and the right to dissent. Poiesis and Prolepsis [Blog]. Available from http://prolepsis-ap.blogspot.co.uk/2015/12/critical-thinking-creative-thinking-and.html [Accessed 25 March 2016].

Whitehead, A.N. (2006). The Concept of nature: the Tarner Lectures delivered in Trinity College, November 1919. Project Gutenberg. Available from http://www.gutenberg.org/files/18835/18835-h/18835-h.htm [25 March 2016].