Critical Design, takes a critical theory based approach to design. Popularized by Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby through their firm, Dunne & Raby. Critical design uses designed artifacts as an embodied critique or commentary on consumer culture. Both the designed artifact (and subsequent use) and the process of designing such an artifact causes reflection on existing values, mores, and practices in a culture.

A critical design will often challenge its audience's preconceptions and expectations thereby provoking new ways of thinking about the object, its use, and the surrounding environment. Critical Designers generally believe design that provokes, inspires, makes us think, and questions fundamental assumptions can make a valuable contribution to debates about the role technology plays in everyday life.

Design as critique is not a new idea. For example, Italian Radical Design of the 1960s and 70s was highly critical of prevailing social values and design ideologies. Critical design builds on this tradition.

Lindsay Grace is a new media artist and professor who currently lives in Chicago, Illinois United States.

He is the C. Michael Armstrong Professor in the School of Fine Arts and the Armstrong Institute for Interactive Media Studies at Miami University Miami University. He teaches video game design, programming and web design.

Most notably he has been publishing writing and video games that relate the concept of “philosophy of software” and Critical Design as practice in the arts. He ran a video game exhibit called Critical Gameplay originally in Chicago, which employed these theories in the design of video games. The work for Critical Gameplay has been shown in Athens, Brazil, Canada, Asian and several north American Venues. It was internationally recognized.

His independent video game publications include Zombie Master. He also writes about games and independent game-making.

In 2008 he created Polyglot [Cubed] which was recognized at the Meaningful play conference at Michigan State, was a serious games showcase finalist at the Interservice/Industry Training, Simulation and Education Conference IITSEC, and the International Conference on Advances in Computer Entertainment Technology. Gamasutra did an article about it. His research includes algorithmic music generation using visual emergent behavior.

Miquel Porta (Barcelona, 1957) is a Catalan physician and epidemiologist. Appointed by the International Epidemiological Association (IEA)[2], in 2008 he succeeded the Canadian epidemiologist John M. Last as Editor of "A Dictionary of Epidemiology". In the Preface to this book he argues for an inclusive and integrative practice of epidemiology.

He is currently the head of the Clinical and Molecular Epidemiology of Cancer Unit at the Hospital del Mar Research Institute - IMIM [3]. He is also a Professor of Preventive Medicine & Public Health, School of Medicine, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB), and an Adjunct Professor of Epidemiology at the School of Public Health, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC). After graduating from the UAB School of Medicine in 1981, Porta was during 3 years a Fellow with the Division of Clinical Pharmacology of UAB. He was then awarded a Fulbright scholarship to pursue the Master of Public Health (MPH) program at UNC, where he was later a Burroughs Wellcome Postdoctoral Fellow in Pharmacoepidemiology.