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Abstract
Fictitious future scenarios are used in the technology industry to identify new opportunities, test high risk concepts, and rally teams toward a common goal. While such visions can play a crucial role in the technology development process, Digital Humanities futures are largely absent. Software development methods suited to the creation of tools for shoppers or workers are a poor fit for the design of tools that embody the intentional fuzziness, nuanced positionalities, and reflexive activities of critical interpretation. Therefore this paper proposes a design approach that combines core concepts from critical theory with design's speculative inventiveness and introduces the subject-computer-interface as an alternative to industry's user-centered concept. Case studies investigate how this triad of meta processes - the meta of critical interpretation, the meta of speculative reflexive design, and the meta of subject-computer-interface - might work by using critical making to engage recent concepts from digital humanities theory to invent new digital affordances. The paper concludes with a speculative design brief that challenges designers, humanists, and computer scientists to use a meta-meta-meta approach that begins with core humanities concepts and designs outward to imagine digital humanities tools that don't yet exist.
Keywords: critical making, critical theory, digital humanities, interface, speculative design
Introduction
In the technology industry, engineers and designers are working today on the computational capabilities of the next 5 to 20 years. In the process, corporations and startups sometimes use fictitious future scenarios to identify new opportunities, test high risk concepts, inspire teams toward a common goal, and generate consumer interest (Johnson, 2011). While these visions can play a crucial role in the technology development process, humanities-based future scenarios are largely absent.
Therefore, to insure that the culture, values, and practices of the humanities are not excluded from future technologies, this paper proposes a way to bring the speculative inventiveness of design together with the critical interpretation of the humanities to imagine what might be accomplished with digital tools that don't yet exist. In other words, the paper seeks to define a design brief for the creation of blue-sky, provocative visions that advance a humanities agenda not only to encourage technology development but also to:
* cast beyond incremental improvements to existing tools;
* investigate the impact of emerging technologies - such...