Platform Pudding: designcriticism in development
Design solves problems. At least, so it was thought of. As a creative act, design shapes the processes and products that respond to predetermined needs and necessities. It addresses issues, fulfills human needs and improves the everyday experience. Need to sit down? Make or take a chair. Need to open a door? Behold the doorknob. Through materiality and form, design transforms what is inconvenient, uncomfortable, or unsatisfactory into something functional, accessible, and, importantly, aesthetically rewarding. As a result we have come to see design as ‘problem-solving practice.’ But our problems have gone out of hand – they've become, wicked.[1] Today’s society is marked by converging crises: geopolitical instability, financial wars, genocide, an unsustainable dependence on extractivist models of petrol economies, entrenched systems of racism and sexism, and a post-truth political climate that fuels misinformation, distrust, and polarization. In sum, we’re in trouble. As our troubles seemingly outgrew our political means to encounter them, we tend to gloss over our concerns or come up with quick fixes failing to resolve the roots of the cause. Design, herein, is complicit. So often have solutions been suggested that in reality are no more than well-designed ‘technofixes’ – technological solutions proposed to address complex social, political, or environmental problems without tackling their underlying structural causes. Alongside such empty promises we see how neat designs have often been implemented to camouflage catastrophes, as described by Tony Fry as the ‘aesthetic of concealment.’[2] Design causes problems. So we need to look beyond the presumed role of design as problem solver, and develop perspectives on how it is embedded into the struggles of everyday life. Similarly, rather than smoothening our struggles, Andrea Benedetti and Michele Mauri call on designers to design for friction as a societal method for interventions.[3] Inevitably, such interventions lead us to manipulate the matter of our immediate and everyday surroundings. This is why Otto von Busch provokes designers into ‘making trouble’ in the reclaiming of agency over matter. “Machines, products, and objects all manifest tangible relationships. Tools interfere in the connections people make with their surroundings, modifying the bodily capacities of those who have access and use them.”[4] Fences restrict our movements, security cameras trim our privacy, water canons disrupt non-violent protests, garments discipline our bodies into beauty standards and gender identities, as much as the non-repairability of household utilities disrupt the durability of our domestic rituals. These are the ‘dark matters,’ constraining our ability to adjust objects and environments to our own needs. So, to design, then, is to hack. It is to refuse the status quo as an immutable condition or system and instead search for opportunities, interventions, and grassroots alternatives. More than mere modes of production, design is a method of inquiry that actively engages with our surroundings. So perhaps it’s about time that we look beyond presumed solutions and quick fixes, and learn how to stay with the trouble instead. Such is argued for by Donna Haraway who calls for “sympoietic practices for living on a damaged planet.”[5] As we already are in trouble, we best learn to stay with it.
* * *
Platform Pudding invites writers, designers and researchers to reflect on the involvement of design in today’s troubles. How is design and the material culture of everyday life embedded into issues ranging from cross-temporal catastrophes to minor inconveniences? We are welcoming all sorts of written contributions, ranging from essays, academic theories, designerly observations, to webshop reviews. Submissions can be individual or collective and may contain writings that have been priorly published elsewhere as long as the copyrights retain with the author. The deadline for submissions is the 17th of August, 2026. Please send your texts and further questions to write@platformpudding.com. Text documents should be submitted as .doc or .docx files with a limit of a 1500 wordcount (excluding notes). Detailed author guidelines can be found in the submission guidelines.
1. Richard Buchanan, “Wicked Problems in Design Thinking,” Design Issues 8, no. 2 (1992), 5–21. 2. Tony Fry, Design as Politics (New York: Berg, 2011), 25. 3. Andrea Benedetti and Michele Mauri, “Design for Friction. An Inquiry to Position Friction as a Method for Reflection in Design Interventions.” Convergências - Revista de Investigação E Ensino Das Artes 16, no. 31 (2023). https://doi.org/10.53681/c1514225187514391s.31.139. 4. Otto von Busch, Making Trouble: Design and Material Activism (London: Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2022). 5. See also Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016).