Adversarial Design

by Carl 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.

Genres: Design, Art, Nonfiction, Technology, Research

168 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2012

Reviews

[Kars]

A thought-provoking attempt to translate the ideas of agonistic pluralism (Mouffe) to interaction design. Highly relevant to my own research on contestation I algorithmic systems. If you've read anything by Bogost the rhetorical style should come across as familiar. DiSalvo isn't as witty as the aforementioned, though.

[Zuhair]

An inspiring introduction to a design practice that discourages immediate, narrow design solutions and instead encourages agonism and speculation within responses. Clear and concise.

[Devyani Lal]

For a person transforming his or her practice from existent traditional norms of design to a more challenging space of the intangible socio- economic rights or wrongs, can be a daunting endeavour. Seeking a desirable change in communities where design is viewed as a responsible and powerful medium to explore various aspects of design for politics or political design. This book is a good starting point, it allows you to see agnostic design as something achievable with tangible consequences as opposed to protesting for the sake of protesting.

[camille!]

really interesting look at design as a tool for democratic debate

[Alex]

Carl DiSalvo provides a very interesting frame to think about Design through agonism (a political theory that embraces certain forms of conflict and dissent as valuable). Parts of the book were tricky to understand, but the examples helped a lot. There are also interesting tangents that the book raises outside of Adversarial Design that I found quite thought provoking and worthy of further examination.

My oversimplified takeaway is that Design can be the exploration of how things are as well as furthering discussion of how they SHOULD be.

[Andrew Maier]

A delightful book that challenges conventional notions of design. Briefly, democracy can only work when every one of us has the freedom to express ourselves. Disalvo provides a number of avenues by which designers might consider our work differently.

[Paris Sel]

DiSalvo might not have the writing charisma of Dunne and Raby (bad), nor their ambition (not too bad), but he analyses in depth selected design examples, instead of collating loads and talking superficially about them. Educational.