Books
Design As Democratic Inquiry
In this counterpoint to the grand narratives of design punditry, DiSalvo presents what he calls “doing design otherwise.” Arguing that democracy requires constant renewal and care, he shows how designers can supply novel contributions to local democracy by drawing together theory and practice, making and reflection. The relentless pursuit of innovation, uncritical embrace of the new and novel, and treatment of all things as design problems, says DiSalvo, can lead to cultural imperialism. In Design as Democratic Inquiry, he recounts a series of projects that exemplify engaged design in practice.
Available in paperback or
open access from MIT Press.
Through practices of collaborative imagination and making, or "doing design otherwise,” design experiments can contribute to keeping local democracies vibrant.
Adversarial Design
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. DiSalvo's analysis provides design criticism with a new approach for thinking about the relationship between forms of political expression, computation as a medium, and the products of design.
Available in paperback.
An exploration of the political qualities of technology design beyond simplistic problem solving.