ADVERSARIAL DESIGN

Skrevet af DISALVO

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.