Critical design is frequently based on irony, disruption or alienation and creates a sense of distance. In this book, Judith Dörrenbacher looks for alternatives within New Materialism and in theories about animism, a concept strongly influenced by the colonial era and which has undergone a revision since the 1990s. How might critique and reflection work if we understand humans to be inextricably bound to their environment?

In this book, four animistic practices are identified and discussed in relation to design. Paradoxically, here, critical distance emerges through proximity. The practices play with an alternation between the self and the other and are (self)reflexive. They are particularly suitable for exploring and designing networked or anthropomorphic artifacts (such as IoT devices and voice assistants) whose boundaries to each other and to humans are blurred.