What Is Critical Design? Questioning Assumptions

Critical design is not a method for quickly solving the problem in front of us. It is a way to pause the values, systems, and business assumptions that have become normal, and ask whether they should remain as they are.

In much of business, fast answers are expected: make it easier to use, easier to sell, or more efficient. These are important. But if the question itself is outdated, even a good answer may not change the future.

Critical design looks at the question before the answer. Do customers truly want this? Should society accept this kind of convenience? What assumptions guide the company's decisions? These questions deepen the review of business and brand.

When a business stops growing, many organizations try to add more measures: change advertising, fix the website, rename the product. But if the assumptions do not change, the measures keep circling the same place.

For example, if the only question is “how can we make it more convenient,” the company may miss the anxiety or burden that comes after convenience. If the only question is “how can we sell more,” the value meaningful to people may become thin.

Business and brand need questions not for criticism itself, but for deepening decisions. When the question changes, the customers to see, the value to protect, and the measures to stop also change. From there, decision-making toward the future begins.

Design thinking begins with understanding customers, defining a problem, testing, and improving. It is effective for listening to users and moving toward better solutions.

Critical design, on the other hand, questions how the problem is framed. Is that inconvenience truly something to solve? What might be lost when convenience increases? Are current systems or cultures leaving someone behind?

Neither is right in every situation. In practice, it is useful to question assumptions through critical design first, then move into solutions through design thinking. Separating questioning from solving helps business decisions avoid becoming shallow.

In BOEL's PROJECTS case Hakodate Airport, a regional airport was redefined not as a place only for transit, but as the first point of encounter with the Hakodate region.

The case questioned an assumption: is an airport only meant to provide guidance information? What atmosphere should travelers feel at the start of their trip, and what regional story should they enter? By designing this as experience, the airport's role expanded from transportation function to entrance for the regional brand.

Critical design works in the same way. By questioning assumptions, the meaning of the same thing changes. The question is not only what to make, but how to reinterpret it. That question becomes the starting point of brand experience design.

Read the PROJECTS case “Hakodate Airport”: https://www.boel.co.jp/projects/hakodate-airport/

To begin in practice, it does not need to be difficult. First, collect small discomforts felt by customers or employees: why is the company hard to explain, why is it easily compared, or why is a good product not chosen?

Next, turn the assumptions behind those discomforts into hypotheses. Put unconscious beliefs into words, such as “we assume we are chosen only for convenience” or “we assume customers compare only by function.”

Then create temporary expressions or experiences and use them for dialogue inside and outside the company. What matters is not completion, but moving thought. When new questions emerge from dialogue, return them to business and brand decisions. This cycle builds the ability to review assumptions.

Critical design is not only for rejecting something. If it ends with creating discomfort, it becomes hard to use in practice. What matters is deciding what to choose after questioning.

Should a new business continue or stop? How should customer touchpoints change? What should be communicated, and what should not? A question gains power only when it returns to decisions like these.

For that reason, the people who ask questions and the people who decide should not be separated. Move between management, the field, and customer touchpoints, and grow questions and decisions together. In this way, critique turns into business progress.

BOEL sees critical design not as a special expression method, but as an attitude for deepening decisions.

When a company changes, it does not need only new answers. It must review the assumptions that supported its previous answers. When assumptions change, the way products, touchpoints, organizations, and communication are chosen also changes.

Creating questions may look indirect. But if the question remains shallow, the future will also remain shallow. Quietly reviewing what is treated as obvious, then passing that question into decisions: this is the value of critical design as Design the Decision.