Abstract

The term “artifact” can refer to many different things. Common definitions describe an artifact as “something created by humans usually for a practical purpose; especially: an object remaining from a particular period” and “something characteristic of or resulting from a particular human institution, period, trend, or individual” (Merriam-Webster’s Online Dictionary, 2012). The word itself was coined in the early nineteenthth century and it comes from two Latin words: arte (from ars) that means “by skill” and factum that is the past participle of facere, to do or to make. All artifacts are characterized by this twin relationship between doing and making that is found in facere. Accordingly, “an artifact is anything that we can design in the very large sense of the word” (Friedman, 2007, p. 7), including both the artifacts of doing and the artifacts of making.