CURRENT Critical use is mediated. Critical use is applied. Critical use is an act of appropriation. Critical USE drives content and insight. It spins off new: systems, ideas, solutions, rigor sets, affinities. Critical use gets us past the blocking points. Critical use is risky it asks us to engage in new ways. | NOTICED SOMETHING the other day. About the work we are doing on the cloTHING(s) as Conversation project and the emergent research discussions and design outcomes that are occurring/ appearing on the periphery. Provocative possibilities pointing to Critical Use are at play. At Emily Carr there is a significant con- tingent of individuals seeking to re-think the status quo. This is driven by a common set of values that hold; that the connections we have with people, the environment and the artifacts around us are meaningful and significant; that consumptive tendencies in contemporary western society set up an unhealthy disconnect; our presumed relations with waste and care need significant re-adjustment. Shifts require shocks of sorts. Many of us apply strategies from Critical Design, and Critical Making in order to sort through, prof- fer up, and attempt to condition new outcomes and relations or, more radically, afford paradigm change. Yet this does not quite satisfy. For those of us working with clothing, there is a discourse complimentary to our own that has come to us through the work of Kate Fletcher on the Local Wisdom project and by extension the articulation of Craft of Use practices. At Emily Carr, in the cloTH- ING(s) as Conversation project, we are considering use and craft of use—identifying, applying and amplifying insights from our own individual and group mediated experiences. My intent here is to begin to frame this tendency and set of emer- gent practices at Emily Carr. I will outline and situate key aspects of Critical Design, Critical Making, and other creative theoretical frameworks and modes of inquiry that are informing Critical Use. I will discuss investigations and strategic applications of artifacts and actions that privilege and prioritize use as a means, an infor- mant, and instigator of changed perspectives. In doing so] aim to provide an initial mapping of a design practice that interrogates and calls into question our current relations with use. PRECEDENTS: THE TERM CRITICAL To begin, it is worth considering when and how we use the term “critical.” As an adjective, the word critical serves to modify or describe nouns: stable placeholders such as names, and words that act as markers. Critical can be understood as “expressing adverse or disapproving comments or judgments” [5]. Connected to situa- tions or problems that are at “a point of crisis” it refers to decisive It makes use of quasi—disruptive forms. It draws on embodied experience. It is situational but not positivist. Phenomenology plays a role. Through USE things adjust. New modes are generated. Use is not stable/static. It is dynamic. Perpetual. It is giving. or crucial actions/choices that are required in order for something to succeed or fail. When used in relation to nature and properties of matter and energy in physics, “critical” speaks to “a point of transition from one state to another” [8]. Inthe Arts “critical” is used to describe acts of analysis and evaluation that take on and consider the merits or faults of an artifact or body of work [6]. Crit- ical Design, Critical Making, Critical Use all tap into this. These are design approaches that demonstrate concern, discomfort with the status quo, and a desire to point to, invoke and incite changed relations with the products of design. The ways in which they do this varies. CRITICAL DESIGN First applied in the late 1990’s, Critical Design makes use of specu- lative design proposals in order “to challenge narrow assumptions, preconceptions and givens about the role products play in every- day life” [16, 15]. Dunne and Raby are careful to situate Critical Design asa position and not method [16]. Critical Design is a device intended to make us think—to produce artifacts that raise awareness, expose assumptions, provoke action, spark debate [16]. While the tactics it applies lead us to a reflective space it also, argu- ably, acts as a catalyst. Design artifacts that come out of a Critical Design approach offer up opportunities to consider alternate spaces and modes of engagement. These are provocateurs that make use of Design Fictions and storytelling that act as “diegetic prototypes” [2]. As such they afford a means to test an idea [2] and arguably (contrary to Dunne and Raby’s original articulation) point to means of accessing them as part of a method of inquiry. Something else important to consider, Critical Design situates its propositions in a detached space—separate from the user. Ameans of entertaining—“in an intellectual sort of way, like literature or film” [16]—we are titillated /enticed but relegated to observer. We do not participate in its making. Possibilities of knowing through lived engagement and usage are not offered up to us. EMPATHY AND HEURISTICS In other domains of Design, engagement with use is increasingly common. Role playing empathy techniques such as Experience Prototyping and Bodystorming are used by Designers as a means to immerse and internalize alternate lived experience (to release