Be provoking. Schooling critical and speculative designers

Abstract

Designing the provocation is a powerful strategy to jump from denouncing to generating actions and behaviors of a critical and speculative nature in design students. This article presents the discursive character of critical design function through three guidelines for provocation design: intellectual risk, generative challenge, and embodied futures, based on the philosophical concept of experience as an act of knowledge. Those are discussed on three classroom experiences in clothing design, architecture, and industrial design in Medellín, Colombia, showing possibilities and challenges for critical and speculative design schooling as well as bringing teachers and students closer to new ways of interacting with social problems in the context of Latin America.