In Adversarial Design, Carl DiSalvo examines the
ways that technology 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 to improve governance, for example,
by redesigning ballots and polling places; it is
implicitly contestational and strives to question
conventional approaches to political issues. DiSalvo
explores the political qualities and potentials of
design by examining a series of projects that span
design and 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 that
shape sociability, and everyday objects embedded with
microchips that enable users to circumvent
surveillance--through the lens of agonism, a political
theory that emphasizes contention as foundational to
democracy. Each of these projects engages one of three
categories as a medium--information, robots, and
ubiquitous computing--and in each of them certain
distinctive qualities of computation are used for
political ends or to bring forth political issues.
DiSalvo's illuminating analysis aims to provide design
criticism with a new approach for thinking about the
relationship between forms of political expression,
computation as a medium, and the processes and products
of design.
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