This is a recording of a lecture for the Department of Design at Goldsmiths, University of London, presenting a design framework developed to explore the discursive practices of design within educational settings. Special thanks to Tim Miller for the invitation.

Abstract:

Imagine, if you will, a world where the narratives we tell ourselves are not truths etched in the firmament but fabrications—fragile, deliberate, and often cruel. Critical fables are a design practice that lays bare these fabrications, exposing the fragile and constructed nature of the realities we inhabit.

Critical fables use the crafted object, the tangible story, to unravel entrenched assumptions and challenge the arbitrary foundations of what we take for granted. They speak through materiality, insisting that the act of making is itself an act of rethinking. In each artefact lies not only a critique but a confrontation with power, with history, and with possibility.

What emerges is not escape but engagement: the slow, deliberate work of reshaping—not just the future, but the present, here and now. These fables do not seek to escape the world; they aim to reconfigure it, to reassemble its pieces into forms that hold hope, resistance, and possibility. And so, they ask us, the makers and the dreamers: what will you craft from the stories you have inherited?

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