quotes from "Para-functionality", Herzian Tales

"The prefix “para-” suggests that such design is within the realms of utility but attempts to go beyond conventional definitions of functionalism to include the poetic."(p. 43.)

Jack Kevorkian’s Suicide Machine is a powerful piece of “unofficial” design and shows how an industrial object can embody complex ideas through invention as a form of social criticism. (p.44)

"Yet Jack Kevorkian’s Suicide Machine, a powerful “unofficial” design that mate- rializes complex issues of law, ethics, and self-determination, shows how an in- dustrial invention can be a form of criticism. ... It suggests a role for design objects as discourse where functionality can be used to criticize the limits that products impose on our actions."(p. 43.)

...

"In a review of an exhibition of work by Intermediate Unit 3, Objects in the Landscape, at London’s Architectural Association, Irie (1993) contrasts the“electronic devices essential to contemporary urban existence,” the means whereby “information, entertainment and fantasy are promoted—and con- trolled,” with the unit’s “virus-like prototypes” that “invade and disrupt such networks, and propel minds and bodies into a hectically deregulated world of fragments—fragments of ideals, of illusions, of sensory impressions.”"(p. 45.)

"When these props are introduced into everyday life as a “virus,” subverting it, people can participate in the story, exploring the boundaries between what is and what might be. This is the role of the para-functional as criticism."(p. 67.)