CRITICAL MAKING, asa term, was initially used by Matt Rattoin
2008 and first published in 2009 to describe the combination of
critical thinking with hands-on making—a kind of pedagogical
practice that uses material engagements with technologies to open
up and extend critical social reflection. In Ratto and Hoekema’s
words, “critical making is an elision of two typically disconnected
modes of engagement in the world—‘critical thinking,’ often con-
sidered as abstract, explicit, linguistically based, internal and
cognitively individualistic; and ‘making, typically understood

as material, tacit, embodied, external and community-oriented”
[19]. Ratto wanted the term to act as glue between conceptual and
linguistic-oriented thinking and physical and materially based
making with an emphasis on introducing hands-on practice to
scholars that were primarily working through language and texts,
such as those in the fields of communication, information studies,
and science and technology studies [20].

Because of its stress on critique and expression rather than
technical refinement and utility, Ratto acknowledges that crit-
ical making has similarities to the practice of critical design, a
term popularized by Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby [6]. Critical
design comes from the background of industrial design and builds
objects that work to challenge the narrow conventions and biases
that products play in daily life, primarily those that determine that
products need to be convenient, affirmative, soothing, and empow-
ering for the user. Critical design is focused on building industrial
design prototypes that question the way products reinforce a banal
and comfortable status quo by being efficient, optimized or com-
fortable, and instead pushes users into more complex emotional
and psychological territory by questioning social norms and stim-
ulating discussion and criticism of design itself [4]. For example,
critical designers often build products for a dystopic future, with
the prototypes professionally documented and communicated
through narrative video or images: “Products... asa special cate-
gory of object, can locate these issues within a context of everyday
material culture. Design today is concerned with commercial and
marketing activities, but it could operate on a more intellectual
level, bringing philosophical issues into an everyday context in a
novel yet accessible way” [5].

Despite their similarities, anumber of key differences between
critical design and critical making exist. Critical making, as
envisioned by Ratto in 2011, was much more focused on the con-
structive process of making as opposed to building an artifact.
While critical design is focused on building refined objects to

generate critique of traditional industrial design, critical making
was initially conceived as a workshop framework with the final
prototypes existing only asa remnant of the process [19]. Critical
design, on the other hand, tends to be focused on building objects
that document well, with the artifacts themselves challenging con-
cepts like optimization, efficiency, social norms, and utopianism.
Critical design is object-oriented; critical making is process-ori-
ented and scholarship-oriented: “Critical making emphasizes the
shared acts of making rather than the evocative object. The final
prototypes are not intended to be displayed and to speak for them-
selves” [19]. Ratto’s emphasisis on using hands-on techniques to
augment the process of critical thinking about information systems,
while Dunne and Raby’s critical design is primarily focused on
building photo and video props for the construction of a speculative
narrative to help us rethink designed objects and consumer culture.

As a process and scholarship-oriented practice, Ratto’s critical
making resembles the field of “values in design,” a concept most
closely affiliated with Helen Nissenbaum [15]. Values in design is
an approach to studying sociotechnical systems from the perspec-
tive of values, and starts from the assumption that technology
is never neutral: “Certain design decisions enable or restrict the
ways in which material objects may be used, and those decisions
feed back into the myths and symbols we think are meaningful”
[16]. Values in design is an approach to scholarship and a workshop
method that strives to unpack the assumptions behind techno-
logical designs and increase understanding in how technological
objects shape social values. Although objects are at the heart of
this process and scholarship, the understanding of these objects
is of prime importance. Like in Ratto’s critical making, techno-
logical objects are primarily to be studied, worked through, and
understood through a value-oriented process of scholarly inquiry.
Critical making explicitly names making as an important part
of this process, while making is optional in the process of values
in design. Critical making is like values in design, but the former
clearly emphasizes the value of material production asa site for
critical reflection, following the “material turn” that highlights
material objects as a key part of social processes and conceptual
frameworks [10]. Ratto’s term of critical making is a construction-
ist approach to work through values in design, information studies,
or science and technology studies [18].

Standard methods of technological design—whether through
consumer culture or traditional fields of science and engineering—
often produce systems that lack cultural richness, emotion, and

MATERIAL PRACTICES