James Malazita, RPI
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As in engineering (and STEM fields generally), making activities have also been embraced in the humanities and interpretive social sciences; these wide-ranging making activities have been generally grouped under the banner of the “digital humanities”. Though the subfield represents a diverse array of practices, recently, humanities scholars have embraced physical and physical-digital hybrid making tools, such as machine shopping and 3D printing.
While critical making and fabrication work has made important pedagogical contributions to the field, Alan Liu notes that “the digital humanities are noticeably missing in action on the cultural-critical scene”. The focus of the computational and maker arms of the Digital Humanities on presentation, curation, and creative, technology-centered pedagogy at the expense of critique and theory-generation, Liu argues, prevents digital humanists from being fully integrated and allied within the Humanities field. As such, Digital Humanities research has often been met with resistance by other humanistic scholars, who may characterize Digital Humanities work as a fad, or, worse still, as a cooptation of the humanities by STEM practices and epistemologies.
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This presentation aims to address these critiques by arguing for the transformation of the digital humanities through “critical design”. Critical Design, an admittedly loosely-defined set of practices and near-nonexistent methodologies, critically inverts the design process: rather than using design methods to solve problems, design methods are used to confront the user with social problems, often intending to complicate, rather than simplify, user experience. Thus, while most technological tools brought to the humanities are framed as ways of methodologically augmenting humanities work, critical design affords a venue to do humanistic critique and scholarship outside of (and in addition to) the written word. In addition, this presentation will showcase critical design research work undertaken by undergraduate humanities and engineering students at Rensselaer Polytechnic.