Post Optimal Objects in Social Design: Search Experience in Historical Retrospective

Abstract

The article considers the experience of application in historical and cultural research of two key concepts of the concept of critical design by Anthony Dunne: “post-optimality”, which is used to describe aesthetics or poetics of the social process or phenomenon, and “para-functionality” characterizing not the essence of the social process, but its semantics. It has been argued that the notion of critical design applied in the field of IT-technologies can be transferred to the field of social and political design, where critical design can develop as a form of discourse —  beyond the design of traditional consumer products, to model social communications. As an example, the history of coffee consumption in the USSR was chosen as a political and cultural tool that shapes the development of society at the level of behavioral patterns. The loss of critical social design in Soviet society by the culture of coffee consumption occurred in the 1980s and preceded the political collapse of the entire Soviet “project”, which allows to analyze it as a complete and complete experience of transformation of the design object.