Carl DiSalvo

My work draws together science and technology studies, the humanities, and design research to analyze the social and political qualities of design and prototype experimental systems and services. Areas of Research Public Design, Speculative Design, Participatory Design, Social Computing, Civic Media, Food and Food Systems, Environmental Monitoring and Representation, Maps and Mapping, Drones Adversarial Design My first book, Adversarial Design, is part of the Design Thinking / Design Theory series on MIT Press. In this book I examine the ways that technology design can provoke and engage the political. I explore 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. I view 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 and dissensus as foundational to democracy. Through my analysis I aim 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.