Critical Making is a term originally popularized by Matt Ratto, which refers to methods that combine technical manipulation and fabrication with critical thinking. This approach considers that directly and practically manipulating technical objects is a form of thinking. Critical Making distances itself from approaches that focus solely on the instrumentalization of artefacts, by avoiding reducing them to their functional aims and the purposes for which they were designed. By manipulating, tinkering with, dismantling and reassembling objects, participants develop a tacit (i.e., initially intuitive and non-conceptual) understanding not only of affordances, but also of the socio-political implications of artifacts. This method thus values a phenomenological approach to technology, encouraging direct, reflexive engagement with its materiality.
We conceptualize Critical Gardening as a specific practice of Critical Making, in which gardens become sites for the development of interdisciplinary research methods focused on reflexive practice. Whether community, landscape, wilderness, urban or botanical gardens, Critical Gardening pays particular attention to the design and maintenance of gardens, their creation and evolution, while taking into account their socio-historical situation as well as their decision-making and organizational structure. The practice of gardening is then oriented towards educational goals, raising awareness of the forms of power and alteration operated by humans on their environment. But it is also an awareness of other forms of life, of other scales of biological and technological systems and their interweaving, which allow us to de-anthropocentricate the practice of gardening and develop forms of resilience, food security and sustainability within the ecosystems in which we participate.