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To be 'critical' is to analyze and evaluate, examine the existence of something, and note points of success, failure or shifts in perspective. 'Making', in contrast, indicates materialization or production, a means to determine the essential things needed to form, build, and create through a process of construction.
Design and the digital humanities share common ground as disciplines, philosophies, mediums, practices, and tools. Attempts to further define these areas rely on the content, forms or technologies with which their practitioners and scholars are engaged. Notably, critical making has marked inquiry in both disciplines. The term is used by Andrew Blauvelt toward integrating design practice with "teaching when, how and why to question things" (1996, p. 57), as an essential part of the design discipline establishing itself as a liberal field of scholarship (Swanson, 1994). Defining it as a method for critical thinking and analysis through the act of collaborative building, Matt Ratto adopts the term to bridge physical and conceptual means of production (Ratto, 2011, 253) within the context of the digital humanities. A special session at the 2014 Modern Language Association, "Critical Making in the Digital Humanities", brought together scholars working in and through critical making practice (MLA, 2014). A spring 2015 series of related webinars on critical making in the humanities focused on "speculative design, digital humanities, and media archaeology"(Whitson, 2015). The publication The Art of Critical Making, describes the key components of critical making design pedagogy at the Rhode Island School of Design as "hands-on practice, the processing of enhanced seeing and perception, and contextualized understanding" (Somerson, 2013, p. 19).
Critical making situates studio-based practices as scholarship in ways that augment existing theories of design authorship, production and thinking. Designers engage with audiences through humanistic or scientific inquiry, creating systems of meaning and shaping understanding through innovative processes or collaborations. In the humanities, critical making is a means to assert the value of digital tools in constructing and building toward understanding and analyzing, within the context of well-established conventions of scholarship. Acknowledging distinctions between approaches of "design-oriented research" and "research-oriented design" (Fallman, 2007), we see that scholarly inquiry is, overall, concerned with method and process as much as the final outcome. As a developing framework to integrate activity and artifact, critical making...