Critical Making as Materializing the Politics of Design

The notion of “critical making” suggests a new form of design, through which the political qualities of an issue are materialized by participatory means. In this essay I trace and describe this process through the Growbot Garden project—a design project directed at reimagining agricultural technologies to support small-scale agriculture. Through a discussion of this project I draw out the ways that politics were actively projected onto and through artifacts by the participants. In effect, these artifacts were a material expression of their desires and commitments. By creating these artifacts, the participants enacted a novel mode of “doing” political design as a collaborative and public endeavor of articulation.