Designs for Foraging

Please join us for colloquium guest speaker Carl DiSalvo. 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. He is also the co-director of the Intel Science and Technology Center for Social Computing.  He 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). 

Title: Designs for Foraging

Abstract: Foraging is the activity of collecting fruits and vegetables from sites other than farms or orchards, such as collecting apples from trees in parks or mustard greens from abandoned lots. The Designs for Foraging project is an ongoing, multi-year design research project exploring how to support urban foragers, and the project also provides the opportunity to theorize the role of design in new economic and civic contexts. In this talk I’ll present ethnographic work into the practices of foraging and research through design work investigating the use of hobbyist drones to support foraging. Drawing together scholarship from Science and Technology Studies and Design Studies, I’ll discuss how designing for foraging produces insight into the challenges and opportunities of designing for shifting scales of practice. Specifically, I argue that foraging exemplifies a shift towards post-capitalist economics and hybrid civic services. This, then, requires new product-service ecologies and new approaches to understanding and analyzing material participation in matters of public concern.  I will also set this work in the context of a series of projects, both past and current, to describe how the Designs for Foraging project contributes a broad research agenda exploring participation with and through computational media and platforms.