48 © 2012 Massachusetts Institute of Technology DesignIssues: Volume 28, Number 3 Summer 2012 Toward a Public Rhetoric Through Participatory Design: Critical Engagements and Creative Expression in the Neighborhood Networks Project Carl DiSalvo, Marti Louw, David Holstius, Illah Nourbakhsh, Ayça Akin Introduction In her paper, “P for Political,” Beck poses the question: “What con- stitutes political action through computing?” 1 Certainly, the his- tory and range of contemporary projects in Participatory Design provide a rich and varied set of answers to that question. To those answers, we would like to propose two others: prompting critical engagements with technology and enabling people to use technol- ogy to produce creative expressions about issues of concern. By critical engagements we mean experiences that bring about the reflective analysis and interpretation of issues, building from traditions in education and in the arts and design. 2 In particular, we are interested in facilitating encounters that reveal and/or call into question common assumptions and beliefs about both tech- nology and the urban environment, and the possible relations between these subjects. The goal of these critical engagements is to provide people with experiential knowledge so that they can make informed and insightful suppositions and judgments concerning the capabilities, limitations, and applications of technology. By creative expressions of issues we mean imaginative and resourceful representations of problems, or possible interventions into the conditions of a problem, which have convincing and aes- thetic qualities. Regarding the use of technology, our interest is in how people apply and manipulate the capabilities of a given tech- nology while infusing the artifacts or systems they produce with their own voice and style. Our goal is not to teach people to be technologists per se, but to help bring people to a point of techno- logical fluency where they are comfortable with and capable of using technology beyond familiar uses. Taken together, critical engagements with technology and the creative expression of issues through technology begin to form a public rhetoric: They constitute the activity of discovering, 1 Eevi Beck, “P for Political: Participation Not Enough,” Scandinavian Journal of Information Systems 14, no. 1 (2002): 77-92. 2 In the arts and design, see Anthony. Dunne and Fiona. Raby, Design Noir: The Secret Life of Electronic Objects (Basel: Birkhäuser, 2001); Grant Kester, ed., Art, Activism, and Oppositionality (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998); Leah Lievrouw, “Oppositional and Activist New Media: Remediation, Reconfiguration, Participation,” inProceedings of the 2006 ACM Conference on Participatory Design: Expanding Boundaries in Design (New York: ACM Press, 2006): 115-24; Nato Thompson and Gregory Sholette, eds., The Interventionists (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006); and Material Beliefs, http://www.materialbeliefs.com (accessed August 1, 2009). Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/DESI_a_00161 by guest on 10 June 2022