In his book, Critical Design in Context, Matthew Malpass talks about how industrial design is flawed in its unfaltering drive towards mass production and consumption.

Critical design rejects the orthodoxy of design for capital gain and rather aims to drive debate and challenge the limits of design. The concept is in direct opposition to the paradigm of commercially oriented development and manufacturing that has become synonymous with companies like Apple and Nike. Instead critical design uses the principles, methods and tactics of design to create objects which act as critique and argument against social and global issues. The objects produced through critical design establish this critique through an object’s narrative, production, context and use.

This book is an interesting resource for my work as it is an almost direct parallel to my experience during my industrial design degree. That program gave me a disturbing insight into industrialized mass production and consumption: in its colonial history, I found the perpetual errosion of human rights and the environment. Inadvertently pushing me to use my acquired skills and understanding in research, design thinking, prototyping, concept generation etc. to make comments (mostly satirically) on a culture driven by consumption and materialism. Of course these ideas were counter intuitive in an industry space designed to maintain a status quo and I eventually had to leave the program. When I discovered critical, I realized I had essentially come to the same conclusions as the designers working to define the relatively new practice of critical design (the term was first used in 1999). The living lab will act as a diegetic object meant to question the role of design in developing tools for agriculture and the consumption of resources.