Claudia Mareis – författare

At the book’s core lies a quiet but radical idea: matter does not merely serve human thought; it participates in how we think, build, and understand our environments. Fibers, surfaces, and tools from tree bark, fungi, and wool to digital data and clouds become active partners in perception and design processes, co-producing knowledge across laboratories, workshops, studios, and archives, and opening new pathways for human–material interaction. Emerging from the Berlin-based Matters of Activity Cluster of Excellence, this volume assembles case studies, essays, and material experiments conducted across the natural sciences, humanities, and design. The underlying collaborative research rethinks materiality as relational, historically situated, and actively shaping the world we inhabit.Final publication of the Cluster of Excellence Matters of Activity (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin)Featuring international, interdisciplinary contributions from design, humanities, and natural sciencesShowcasing numerous projects bridging material research and practice

In its constructive and speculative nature, design has the critical potential to reshape prevalent socio-material realities. At the same time, design is inevitably normative, if not often violent, as it stabilises the past, normalises the present, and precludes just and sustainable futures. The contributions rethink concepts of critique that influence the field of design, question inherent blind spots of the discipline, and expand understandings of what critical design practices could be.With contributions from design theory, practice and education, art theory, philosophy, and informatics, »Critical by Design?« aims to question and unpack the ambivalent tensions between design and critique.