Adversarial Design

In Adversarial Design, Carl DiSalvo examines the ways thattechnology design can provoke and engage the political. He describes a practice, which he terms"adversarial design," that uses the means and forms of design to challenge beliefs,values, and what is taken to be fact. It is not simply applying design to politics--attempting toimprove governance, for example, by redesigning ballots and polling places; it is implicitlycontestational and strives to question conventional approaches to political issues. DiSalvo exploresthe political qualities and potentials of design by examining a series of projects that span designand art, engineering and computer science, agitprop and consumer products. He views these projects--which include computational visualizations of networks of power and influence, therapy robots thatshape sociability, and everyday objects embedded with microchips that enable users to circumventsurveillance--through the lens of agonism, a political theory that emphasizes contention asfoundational to democracy. Each of these projects engages one of three categories as amedium--information, robots, and ubiquitous computing--and in each of them certain distinctivequalities of computation are used for political ends or to bring forth political issues. DiSalvo'silluminating analysis aims to provide design criticism with a new approach for thinking about therelationship between forms of political expression, computation as a medium, and the processes andproducts of design.

Carl DiSalvo is Assistant Professior of Digital Media in the School of Literature, Communication, and Culture at Georgia Institute of Technology.