October 6, 2015
Two Design Experiments in Speculative Civics
ABSTRACT: Design is increasingly involved in our public lives, giving form to issues and working to enable new modes of participation. Usually this takes an instrumental approach in which the goal is to use design to provide solutions to pressing or perceived matters of concern. In this talk I’ll discuss an alternative approach that I call speculative civics. To ground this discussion, I’ll present three design experiments, each of which explores near future civic systems and our experiences with those systems.
BIO: Dr. Carl DiSalvo is an Associate Professor in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication at the Georgia Institute of Technology. At Georgia Tech he directs the Public Design Workshop: a design research studio exploring socially-engaged design practices and civic media. His 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. His current work is broadly concerned with forms of collectivity and the role of design in shaping and enabling collectivity. More specifically, he is studying issue-oriented hackathons as ad-hoc design events and collaborative urban foraging as a site of speculative design in food systems. He also conducts research on environmental monitoring and representation, maps and mapping, drones, and community robotics.
Carl publishes regularly in design, science and technology studies, and human-computer interaction journals and conference proceedings. His first book, Adversarial Design, was published MIT Press in 2012. DiSalvo’s experimental design work has been exhibited and supported by the ZKM, Grey Area Foundation for the Arts, Times Square Arts Alliance, Science Gallery Dublin, and the Walker Arts Center. DiSalvo holds a Ph.D. in Design from Carnegie Mellon University (2006).