Colossus was the first electronic digital programmable computing device, and was used to break German ciphers during World War II. It remained unknown, as a military secret, well into the 1970s. By Unknown – This file is from the collections of The National Archives (United Kingdom), catalogued under document record FO850/234. For high quality reproductions of any item from The National Archives collection please contact the image library., Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=501979

“Critical fabulations are ways of storytelling that rework how things that we design come into being and what they do in the world. They deconstruct design methods to open different understandings of the past that reconfigure the present, creating new opportunities for a just future” (17).

In her book Critical Fabulations, Daniela K. Rosner eloquently works with a series of edges:

  • She brings feminists methodology into a possible future for Design Studies, drawing on Lucy Suchman and Donna Haraway to intervene into the fields of HCI and design engineering. This edge helps redefine design interventions as activist projects.
  • She brings autobiographical experience as a designer with ethnographic observation and analysis of the design cultures she inhabits. This edge generates a feminist approach to critical making and challenges the way current disciplinary distinctions limit design as a philosophical project.
  • She historicises the globally ubiquitous rise of design thinking and the uncritical engagement with making as a mode of production. This is an important revision as it prioritises repair and maintenance over the new.

“I use the discursive practices of a prevailing design tradition to chart the intellectual lineage of its four theoretical pillars: individualism, universalism, objectivism, and solutionism. This framework, I argue, powerfully set up an intellectual space for design, yet also limited the kinds of people who call themselves designers” (25).

An interview with Diana by Yana Boeva here