It is increasingly cheap and easy to create compelling and seductive images of concept designs, which sell solutions and presume problems. We consider a range of strategies, which explicitly reject the search for “solutions”. These include design fiction and critical design but also less well-known techniques, which aim for unuseless, questionable and silly designs.

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Anti-Solutionist Strategies: Seriously Silly Design Fiction

M Blythe, K Andersen, R Clarke, P Wright (2016)

Design research has been criticized as “solutionist” i.e. solving problems that don’t exist or providing “quick fixes” for complex social, political and environmental problems. We respond to this critique by presenting a “solutionist” board game used to generate design concepts.

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Solutionism, the game: design fictions for positive aging

M Blythe, J Steane, J Roe, C Oliver (2015)

This paper reports findings from a series of participatory design workshops with ten people over eighty years old. The focus of the workshops was new banking technologies for the older old. Participants were asked to discuss their current experiences of banking and given packs of concept cards which contained design sketches and brief outlines of concepts for new financial services. The designs on the cards were deliberately provocative and aimed to encourage criticism and debate

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Questionable concepts: critique as resource for designing with eighty somethings

J Vines, M Blythe, S Lindsay, P Dunphy, A Monk, P Oliver

This paper is illustrated with "chindogu" ideas to address the problems and concerns identified in an ethnography. Chindogu must solve one problem but create other (larger) problems. 

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Notes towards an ethnography of domestic technology

M Blythe, A Monk (2002)