"Agreed, but design can't do this without raising critical questions around its own practice first. Design practice is, as I have said above, myopic and shallow, unaware of its own heritage and therefore making the same arguments again and again. If people want to study what designers do from outside the discipline, let them go to material culture studies or STS etc. But if they want to practice the discipline from within...they need to read up on and understand the history of design like every other discipline does. This is the big failure of design academia...no history and theory informing mainstream practice or pedagogy. People just reinvent the wheel over and over again...hence no transcending discourses that have been present for 50+ years."

"The journey is nothing new, if you follow design academia from the Methods movement (Christopher Alexander, John Chris Jones, Bruce Archer etc.) - just that contemporary design academia is myopic and forgetful and the study of the history of design thinking and research, including critical design, is little pursued in contemporary programs, unlike architecture and fine art where there are actual "History of" and "Theory of" courses."

"The metaphor of sex, with its strongly contexted binaries (homo\hetero-sexual), and the long contested history of queer debates, argues for an acknowledgement of wider spectrums, not over-arching universalisms. Even granted biological determinism, sexuality is still a widely contested subject - i.e. biology does not dictate who we are, esp. within the context of technologies that allow us to remake and reform biology."

"Are current design schools so bereft of courses that teach the history of design practice and theory that this it becomes necessary to remind them via general design blogs that it is worthy, every once in a while, to resort to both (self-reflection and criticism, as if there isn't a history of both in design, i.e. Schon, Cross etc.)? (I don't mean to critique you specifically here, just design academia in general here)."

"Again, how can you say that the design disciplines haven't had more than a century long history of intense intellectual engagement? It's as if the entirety of intellectual thought in design that was engaged in questions beyond utility and form from the Bauhaus and Ulm schools onwards doesn't exist, much less disciplines outside design like material culture, science and technology studies, design studies etc. that have been very interested in what, how and why designers make and do!"

"Actually, it is precisely through a critique of the way we relate to objects-of-use and everyday, mundane socio-technical practices and the kinds of discourses that ground them that critical\speculative design differentiates itself from fine art practice. It is precisely through opening up alternative ways of how utility is provided that these forms of design practice raise the questions they do - otherwise what difference is there between design and art?"

"Contemporary speculative and critical design practice has been critiqued precisely for being mostly interested in avowedly apolitical, primarily aesthetic explorations and for being shallow in its criticality. See Luiza, P. and Pedro, O.,  "Questioning the critical in speculative and critical design",  Ansari, A., "Design must fill current human needs before imagining new futures", and Bardzell, J., "What is "critical" about critical design?"."

"Would like to point out here that the distinctions between commercial\responsible and experimental\discursive seem vague and unclear. What about practice enacted through explicitly commercial channels that is undertaken with 'humanitarian' intent, or social innovation that even though it means well, simply reinforces neoliberal or colonial paradigms? And most critical designers, especially Dunne and Raby, would argue that in fact, the entire point is to evoke discourse and raise problematic questions around our relations with technology and each other by exploring and pushing existing boundaries and envisioning possible\alternate futures. The moment you begin to define a particular form of design practice as "commercial" or "social" or "experimental" you are making statements about the kinds of politics, forms of knowledge, and discourses grounding that form of practice. You can't reduce these things to simple universalizing statements."