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Reviewer: Diomidis Spinellis

This book is part of a series on design thinking and theory. The series editors, Ken Friedman and Erik Stolterman, convincingly argue in their introduction that the traditional challenges of design, addressing human needs by acting on the physical world to produce the built environment, are nowadays challenged by a more complex interconnected world. They write that modern design must consider ambiguous boundaries between artifacts, structure, and process; large-scale social, economic, and industrial frames; complex needs, requirements, and constraints; and information content that is often more valuable than the related physical substance. In addition, both the realization and the use of products and processes must answer to several organizations, stakeholders, and producers, at every level of production, distribution, reception, and control. The aim of the series is to explore these challenges and issues in order to help designers address them. This contribution to the series focuses on the design of works that express or enable a political perspective known as agonism, which the author describes as "a condition of forever looping contestation." DiSalvo, an assistant professor of digital media in the School of Literature, Communication, and Culture at the Georgia Institute of Technology, terms this practice adversarial design. The book's first chapter offers numerous examples where agonism influences design: hacked robot dogs monitoring pollution; a computer game where players engage in an agonistic discussion; and, chillingly, a project tracing and mapping the home addresses of prison inmates, which identified some city blocks in Brooklyn that, literally, correspond to millions of dollars spent yearly to incarcerate their residents. The author goes well beyond describing the projects to address ideas associated with the confluence of design with media, computation, and politics, in detail and with ample references to existing work. Three subsequent chapters focus on particular cases of adversarial design, again supported with representative projects from each area. In "Revealing Hegemony," DiSalvo describes projects that reinterpret existing data to visually expose hidden structures, like the relationships between political funding and interest groups, the media, and the oil industry, as well as among company board members. Most readers will have encountered at least one of these engaging, interactive infographics on the web. A design concept that was new to me involves web browser extensions that modify displayed pages; one example inserts details and news associated with military funding into university web pages. The two other areas explored in the book involve social robots, whose behavior is interpreted as an agonistic activity, and ubiquitous computing, where the rich interfaces and communication capabilities of built artifacts allow them to stand for concrete agonistic design ideals. In one case, electric power to home appliances is constrained by the power company, allowing us to think about sustainability and the environment. In another, an umbrella covered with infrared light-emitting diodes (LEDs) disrupts the image processing algorithms of surveillance cameras. All examples are appropriately illustrated, giving the reader a look at how the systems are built. A final chapter, "Adversarial Design as Inquiry and Practice," consolidates the discussed material. If you are a computer scientist, be warned that this is not an easy book to read. It follows the social science style of discourse, presenting a structure or battle of ideas and their originators rather than the algorithms, systems code, and empirical results typically found in computer science books. I would have liked to read more about the effects that the systems DiSalvo describes have on politics and society, as well as some prescriptive advice on how to engage in adversarial design. Nevertheless, the book opened up a rich and engaging field and vision for me. I think many other readers will feel the same way. Online Computing Reviews Service