Critical making is hands-on hardware practice as a form of reflection and analysis: a way of thinking through what (and how) computing and digital media mean by understanding how they work, building on the literature of media studies and the digital humanities. By turning from software to hardware, to the physicality of computation and communications infrastructure, we will take objects apart, literally and figuratively, and in the process will learn to interpret and to intervene -- using prototyping, reverse engineering, hardware hacking and circuit bending, design fiction, electronics fabrication and other approaches -- in the material layer of digital technologies.