2023
Cruel Technology
Exploring metaphoric ways to understand Critical Design through Theatre.
00 / Summary
Originally titled 'From Slow to Cruel Technology'; my Master’s thesis on Critical Design and the difficulty of turning its philosophical ambitions into design practice.
I explored metaphor as a bridge between abstract theory and practical ways of designing, moving from Slow Technology and the window/mirror metaphor toward theatre — eventually using Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty to imagine digital technology as a live, situated spectacle rather than a transparent tool.
01 / Foundations
From philosophy towards practice
I want technology in my life to matter. Critical Design interests me as an approach to technology that prioritizes reflection over optimization. But its defining qualities can remain philosophical and difficult to translate into actual design practice.
For my master's thesis, I wanted to explore the physical and metaphysical qualities of critical design artefacts, hoping to understand what a digital artefact needs to do in order to incite critical reflection. The ambition was to work my way from the design-philosophical level down to an applicable methodological level.
My ambition had roots in project work during my bachelor's. Three theoretical traditions recurred across four projects spanning my BA and MA, repeatedly changing function before converging in Cruel Technology:
Thesis Genealogy:
It is easy to say that technology should provoke reflection, resist transparency or become strange enough to be noticed, but how do you actually design that?
What followed was an exploratory journey through Slow Technology, aesthetic experience, interface metaphors and theatre.
02 / Convergence
Art or design?
That question repeatedly blurred the distinction between Critical Design and technological art.
Critical Design usually gives the artefact an investigative purpose. It uses designed things to interrogate technological, cultural or social relationships. Art requires no equivalent justification: its motive may be perceptual, political, emotional, autobiographical or simply exploratory. A useful distinction, but increasingly difficult to maintain.
My thesis deliberately concentrated on Critical Design’s personal, sensorial and emotional role. Shklovsky’s defamiliarization recovered perception from habit. Dewey described making as an exchange between doing and undergoing. Even envelopment, the exploratory practice proposed for Slow Technology, resembles artistic practice.
Today, the boundary seems most useful for explaining where the ideas came from, not where they must end. Slow Technology, Critical Design, defamiliarization, theatricality and cruelty originated in different traditions, but I was finding the same desire within them:
for media not merely to function, but to be felt.
03 / Metaphor
Windows, mirrors and metaphors
Bolter and Gromala’s window-and-mirror metaphor gave me a simple way to describe the problem.
A medium behaves like a window when attention passes through it toward its content or function. It becomes a mirror when the medium, the user and the situation of interaction reflect off its surface. Conventional usability tends to privilege the window — technology working best when the interface itself disappears. Slow and Critical Technology suggested that sometimes we need the mirror to get the full picture.
The metaphor clarifies what Critical Design resists, but it contains no particular way of designing. I began looking for a metaphor extensive enough to bring practices and methods with it.
Brenda Laurel had already proposed computers as theatre. The screen becomes a stage; software and users become actors; interaction unfolds as dramatic action. Theatre introduced composition in space and time rather than describing an interface as a static collection of tools. The metaphor brings whole languages, traditions and methods with it. That made theatre potentially useful for turning Critical Design philosophy into practice.
Yet Laurel’s theatre inherited the logic of the proscenium. Its machinery should withdraw so that the represented action can become immediate. This makes it a powerful metaphor for usability—and a difficult one for technology intended to reveal its own mediation.
The proscenium stage is a window.
04 / Theatricality
The screen joins the performance
Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty offered a different model.
Cruelty here does not mean sadism or physical violence. It describes the unavoidable effort of consciously undergoing experience. Artaud removed the protective division between stage and audience and surrounded spectators with bodies, architecture, movement, sound, objects and light.
These elements did not merely support a represented play. Each possessed expression and presence of its own.
Rather than plays, the Theatre of Cruelty presents spectacles.
Transferred to digital technology, the computer becomes less a portal into a representation and more a situated ensemble of things happening here and now. It is no longer necessarily the stage upon which everything meaningful occurs. Instead it becomes a cast of controllers, surfaces, hardware, software, the user’s body and the surrounding environment.
Artaud's theatre also gave each medium permission to speak through its own qualities. Slow Technology seemed to ask something remarkably similar of electronic objects: amplify their natural expressions rather than abstract them away.
The language of a digital device is constituted by the expressions of all of its parts.
Rough comparison of theatrical models; proscenium, representation (Laurel) and environment (Artaud).
05 / Methodology
Territorial expansion
Theatre offered a language for what critical technology might be, but not yet a way of making it.
My intended answer was devised theatre.
Rather than beginning with a fixed script, devised performance develops through bodies, spaces, materials, experimentation and ensemble. It is a specific methodological approach to collective, structured improvisation, sensitive to physical, cultural and personal contexts. I wanted to translate that process into Critical Design as a loose structure for organising contexts, activities, prototypes, generative tools and experiments around a technological question.
An early “lotus model” placed three concepts at its centre:
Critical Design supplied the philosophical motivation.
Theatre of Cruelty suggested qualities of the resulting artefacts.
Devised theatre was intended to provide a process for making them.
Together, they formed an approximate movement from why, through what, toward how.
Critical Design has no shortage of stimulating philosophy, but considerably less guidance for moving from 'be critical' or 'create reflection' toward an actual design process. That methodological absence was one of the reasons I began the thesis in the first place. Some of the literature calls for loose frameworks that can help designers choose and organize methods without reducing Critical Design to a recipe.
Early lotus model — May 2020
But the theoretical exploration kept expanding. The thesis eventually became much more successful at asking what critical technology might be than explaining how to make it. Ironic.
By the final version of the model, devised theatre had been displaced from the centre by Windows & Mirrors. The diagrams inadvertently record what happened to the thesis: the theoretical and metaphorical inquiry expanded until it occupied the space intended for methodology.
Final lotus model — September 2023
Methodological infancy
The thesis did not produce the methodology I had set out to make. It produced a theoretical synthesis and a more concrete place from which such a methodology might begin.
I called that synthesis Cruel Technology. It describes digital artefacts that do not withdraw behind their function. Their screens, mechanisms, materials, users and surroundings remain active participants in the experience.
Cruel Technology is not an entirely separate category from Slow Technology or experimental Critical Design, but the conceptual roots of my thesis dig a different path: through performance theory, and through the idea that technology can stage relations rather than merely represent them.
The lotus model maps the conceptual territory I reached—and the methodological work still missing. The thesis ended with a proposition: critical reflection may arise not only from what technology represents, but from how it stages relations among medium, object, body and situation.
At the outset, I understood the absence of methodology as a gap waiting to be filled. By the end, I had experienced why that gap resists closure. A process can organise materials, contexts, activities and experiments, but it cannot prescribe criticality or guarantee reflection. The closer I came to concrete practice, the more the work resembled artistic methodology: situated, exploratory and inseparable from the particular encounter being made.
That does not make Critical Design irrelevant. It may be less a self-contained method than a critical orientation—one that frames what a project investigates, why it stages that relationship and how its effects are interpreted.
Whether this revealed a limit within Critical Design or only the unfinished state of my own project remains unresolved.
06 / Literature
Key literature from the project includes:
Artaud, A. (1938). The Theater and Its Double (M. C. Richards, Trans.). Grove Press.
Bardzell, J., & Bardzell, S. (2013). What is ‘critical’ about critical design? Proceedings of the SIGCHI
Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 3297–3306.
Bardzell, S., Bardzell, J., Forlizzi, J., Zimmerman, J., & Antanitis, J. (2012). Critical design and critical theory: The challenge of designing for provocation. Proceedings of the Designing Interactive Systems
Conference, 288–297.
Bolter, J. D., & Gromala, D. (2003). Windows and Mirrors: Interaction Design, Digital Art, and The Myth of
Transparency. MIT Press.
Dunne, A. (2006). Hertzian Tales: Electronic Products, Aesthetic Experience, and Critical Design. MIT Press.
Hallnäs, L., & Redström, J. (2001). Slow Technology – Designing for Reflection. Personal and Ubiquitous
Computing, 5(3), 201–212.
Laurel, B. (1993). Computers as theatre. Addison-Wesley.
McCarthy, J., & Wright, P. (2004). Technology as experience. MIT Press.
Ryan, M.-L. (2002). Beyond Myth and Metaphor: Narrative in Digital Media. Poetics Today, 23(4), 581–609.
Shklovsky, V. (1917). Art as Technique. In R. J. Lane (Ed.), Global literary theory: An anthology (pp. 7–20).
Routledge.
07 / Additional media
Gallery
