Carl DiSalvo

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.

Adversarial Design

Betsy DiSalvo

Elizabeth Bonsignore

Jason Yip

Participatory Design is a field of research and design that actively engages stakeholders in the processes of design in order to better conceptualize and create tools, environments, and systems that serve those stakeholders. In Participatory Design for Learning: Perspectives from Practice and Research, contributors from across the fields of the learning sciences and design articulate an inclusive practice and begin the process of shaping guidelines for such collaborative involvement. Drawing from a wide range of examples and perspectives, this book explores how participatory design can contribute to the development, implementation, and sustainability of learning innovations. Written for scholars and students, Participatory Design for Learning: Perspectives from Practice and Research develops and draws attention to practices that are relevant to the facilitation of effective educational environments and learning technologies.

Carl DiSalvo

Books

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