CR!T is an active investigation into the meaning of critical design.
Through the website and accompanying Chrome extension, it is navigated rather than defined, tracing relationships across words, contexts, and practices.
The designer takes on the role of facilitator. Users collect sentences, contribute to the archive, and work with footnotes as a way of extending and reflecting on what is gathered.
The platform brings these fragments together, displaying sentences where ways of being critical and ways of designing intersect, forming an evolving space for exploration rather than a fixed definition.
The keywords were chosen to explore different approaches to critical design. The critical axis includes terms related to questioning, critique and post-critical approaches. The design axis includes terms related to making, working, inquiry and theorization. Together, they make it possible to trace where critical and design practices intersect.
The selection is based on my research, readings and interviews. It reflects the language used to describe critical design within the educational and cultural institutions I explored in the Netherlands. Rather than defining the field, the keywords offer one way of navigating it. Their selection shapes what becomes visible in the landscape and what remains outside of it.
Drag to move through the landscape. Select keywords to filter the sentences and see where they meet.
Every sentence you add changes where the landscape leads. The extension only collects a page when you choose to add it, saving the sentences in which the keywords appear, the link to the page and the date it was added.
Load the CR!T Chrome extension from the chrome-extension folder in Chrome's Extensions page.
Download the zipped CR!T Chrome extension here, unzip it, then load the extracted folder on Chrome's Extensions page.
If you or your website appear in the archive and you would like the material to be taken down, feel free to contact me.
Designed + coded by Jess Kürschner as my Bachelor project of the Design Academy Eindhoven, February 2026.
With thanks to my tutor Jeroen de Gruiter, to Ro Perez Gayo for all the help along the way, and to everyone who shared their thoughts on critical design in conversations and interviews.
Contact: hello@jessikuerschner.de
