Home

OUT NOW!
Published by MIT Press
Buy it from Amazon, Wheelersbooks, Booknest, and other booksellers.

For discounts, order via email (orders@triliteral.org) using discount code: MROSNER30
30% off all bindings until 11/1!

In Critical Fabulations, Daniela Rosner proposes redefining design as investigative and activist, personal and culturally situated, responsive and responsible. Challenging the field’s dominant paradigms and reinterpreting its history, Rosner wants to change the way we historicize the practice, reworking it from the inside. Focusing on the development of computational systems, she takes on powerful narratives of innovation and technology shaped by the professional expertise that has become integral to the field’s mounting status within the new industrial economy. To do so, she intervenes in legacies of design, expanding what is considered “design” to include long-silenced narratives of practice, and enhancing existing design methodologies based on these rediscovered inheritances. Drawing on discourses of feminist technoscience, she examines craftwork’s contributions to computing innovation—how craftwork becomes hardware manufacturing, and how hardware manufacturing becomes craftwork. She reclaims, for example, NASA’s “Little Old Ladies,” the women who built information storage for the Apollo missions by weaving wires through magnetized metal rings. Mixing history, theory, personal experience, and case studies, Rosner reweaves fibers of technoscience by slowly reworking the methods and margins of design. She suggests critical fabulations as ways of telling stories that awaken alternative histories, and offers a set of techniques and orientations for fabulating its future. Critical Fabulations shows how design’s hidden inheritances open different possibilities for practice.

Recent & Upcoming Travel

Medea Talks, Malmo, Sweden, Nov ’18

School of CC, Aarhus, Denmark, Nov ’18

UMNG, Bogota, Columbia, Oct ’18

Design @ Large, UCSD, CA, Oct ’18

Data & Society, NYC, NY, Sept ’18

Design @ Large, UC San Diego, CA, Oct ’18

Data & Society, New York City, NY, Sept ’18

Tatlock Lecture, Vassar College, NY, Sept ’18

Why Fabulate Design?, City College, London, July ’18

Sketch Model Workshop, Olin College, June ’18

Workshop & papers, CHI Montreal, May ’18

Collective Futures Panel, IIT ID, Apr ’18

Thesis Symposium, ArtCenter, Apr ’18

Dean’s Colloquium, UT Dallas, Nov ’17

Scholars Lab, UVA, Nov 03 ’17

About

A proposal to redefine design in a way that not only challenges the field’s dominant paradigms but also changes the practice of design itself.

Blog

Coming soon!

Literally. Look out for our installations in and around Africatown—a grassroots vision to preserve and develop the Central Area as a place where the Black experience can grow and flourish. This collaboration with the fabulous Sara Zewde, Azzurra Cox, Aria Goodman, and Selina Hunstiger will feature large-scale placards formatted in the style of the signage used …

Contact

Want to work together? Have questions? Have collaborations ideas? Get in touch!