McKenzie made his legacy teaching and working on projects related to the liberal arts, providing students with the skills and knowledge to formulate effective arguments, communicate well, and solve problems. He devoted all of these efforts to transmedia concepts through smart media and DesignLab research, and teaching with new methods in a creative way. Hence, this edition collects his previous work, showing how digital media transforms the lives of people who will become members of participatory culture in modern society. He identifies critical challenges to a liberal arts education, that is, teaching students not only how to solve problems but also training them to ask which problems to solve and why, and preparing them for a life of service to the nation and all of humanity. Exploring the problems that occur in liberal arts, he starts with critical thinking as the core concept of new ways in critical design. Issues related to community engagement and transmedia knowledge, the basic ideas of the book, are explained concisely in the first of four chapters.

It is fascinating how McKenzie successfully and nicely transforms his ideas and thoughts on paper, presenting the StudioLab pedagogy that includes critical thinking with critical design and skilled writing through transmedia. Because StudioLab is the critical point in design pedagogy, democratizing various forms of classic and digital media, it also creates a platform for “critical thinking with studio-based design thinking and lab-based tactical media-making.” McKenzie focuses these processes for democratizing digitality within StudioLab: “StudioLab can be understood as critical design pedagogy for democratizing digitality [using DesignLab experiences].”

StudioLab activities started in the mid-1990s through a combination of seminar, studio, and lab practices based on the transmedia utilization of diverse forms, processing thoughts and actions through engaged collaborative research. Collaboration is the enabler of transmedia teaching through critical design pedagogy, creating critical thinking, design thinking, and tactical media for courses and projects combining cultural, organizational, and technological performances.

It is worth noting that StudioLab approaches art activist groups as “objects of study” and “models for democratizing the sociotechnical practices of digital culture.” Further, a critical element of the StudioLab concept is the production of smart media and multimedia presentations, “which supplement traditional media forms of books and articles.”

This is actually the idea presented in the second chapter, which deals with transmedia knowledge based on teaching critical design forms, practices, and outcomes. All of these activities are connected with “collaboration”--the term on which the critical design process is based. McKenzie also introduces creative- and knowledge-based participatory cultures in which people work together to build information movement, for example, hacktivists as apolitical groups are explored in the context of a digital environment and the emergence of collective intelligence. Transmedia storytelling (or multiplatform storytelling) using multiple platforms and digital technologies is effectively connected with performance and digitality, where McKenzie sees all performance as electronic performative activities.

The concept of critical performativity is thus aimed at the construction of new and liberating ways of “combining cultural, organizational, and technological performances within the context of democratizing digitality and remixing performative values.” McKenzie overlaps all instances of transmedia performative processes within higher education, from critical design in making media (chapter 2), to smart collaboration and collaborative platforms (chapter 3), to critical design thinking via community engagement and transmedia knowledge (chapter 4). In this way, he presents the core elements of a critical design pedagogy: critical thinking, critical design, and critical performance. The StudioLab manifesto promotes new transdisciplinary pedagogy critical design teams for collaborative, interdisciplinary problem-solving projects that create social innovation, organizational change, and human relationship improvements. With this manifesto, he essentially changes the legacy of liberal arts pedagogy via a progressive transmedia approach.

Although some of the text can be confusing, the book is an interesting look at the ideas, thoughts, and practical issues of liberal arts in the context of a modern technology-based society. Every liberal arts library should have a copy as a general guideline for research, and it is a necessary seminal work for college-level digital media programs.