Matt Malpass is a designer and theorist working to advance design’s agency through critical design practice.

As a Reader in Critical Design Practice at Central Saint Martins University of the Arts London Matt’s theoretical practice explores and develops approaches that establish a critical move through design. He advocates design’s agency in tackling complex social, political, and environmental problems through critical, speculative, empathetic, and participatory practices. His work explores the role critical design practice plays in expanding design’s disciplinary purview. He leads MA Industrial Design and supervises PhD studies internationally. He is the author of Critical Design in Context: History, Theory and Practices and writes regularly on Matters of Design.

  • CDIC is an ongoing project that began in 2007 focused on understanding the role critical and peripheral practices play in developing the design discipline and the matters of concern addressed through design practice. This work is explored through theoretical investigation, design projects and doctoral supervision. The book Critical Design in Context: History, Theory and Practice, introduces critical design as a field, providing a history of the discipline, outlining its key influences, theories and approaches, and explaining how critical design can work in practice through a range of contemporary examples. Critical design moves away from traditional approaches that limit design's role to the production of profitable objects, focusing instead on a practice that is interrogative, discursive and experimental. The book provides an introduction to critical design practice and a manifesto for how a radical and unorthodox practice might provide design answers in an age of austerity and ecological crisis.

  • As a pioneering course in the field, MA Industrial Design develops methodological and critical processes in design practice with a mission to expand the disciplinary purview of industrial design. The course questions what industry is today, the impacts of design practice and the role and agency of the industrial designer engaging in a broad range of contexts to address complex challenges. It employs critical and socially responsive methods to explore the application of industrial design in both market-led and societal contexts. While MAID honours the traditional legacy of the subject, the course operates as space to continually reframe what industrial design is and means as a future-orientated practice.

  • Socially responsive design takes as its primary driver social issues, its main consideration social impact, and its main objective social change. Design in this context addresses complex challenges, characterised by competing and contradictory drivers and desirable outcomes, depending on the context and perspectives of those with a relationship to the problem. As an associate member of the Design Against Crime Research Centre and Public Collaboration Lab, work explores the application and development of socially responsive design processes. Work in this context includes an AHRC Design Fellowship in 2020 focusing on the role that design and specifically social design plays in policy and public service contexts.

  • Design Transforms is a studio project in the Product Ceramic and Industrial Design Programme at Central Saint Martins. Through projects, collaboration, and public engagement the studio interrogates the transformative capacities of design. Working both locally and internationally, the studio collaborates with industry, academic partners, charities, and communities. Design Transforms advocates the role of design in contexts of social justice, citizen-centred innovation, and economic development through inclusive, open and participatory processes that are always informed by pedagogies of care.

  • Regular thoughts and writing on design, practice theory and culture. published on Substack.
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