tandem: Plans evolve to embrace new technical capabilities, while changing campaign objectives in the midst of a project provoke new design directions.

[ 2] Thompson N. and G. Sholette, eds., The Interventionists: User’s Manual for the Creative Disruption of Everyday Life. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2004; offers a recent but by no means exhaustive catalog of artist-activist projects.

Design iterations tend to be very public experiments. Contestational designers seldom have the time or resources to perform controlled trials. New ideas are developed and deployed very quickly. Evaluation is immediate and unsentimental. If an idea shows promise, it is refined and reused. If not, it is abandoned.

[ 3] I refer here to exploiting excess capacity— whether squatting abandoned buildings or utilizing privately owned bandwidth—rather than, say, vandalism or violence.

May + June 2009

[ 4] Indeed, failure can sometimes enhance an activist’s reputation; especially if it presents an opportunity to demonstrate commitment to the movement by, say, getting arrested.

Contending with direct opposition by state, corporate, and nongovernmental actors also influences design decisions. Projects often, but not always, privilege quick deployment and replicabil-ity over long-term sustainability. Concerns about confiscation and subpoenas lead to minimal data-collection and retention policies, and highlight the importance of trust in determining end-user adoption. Activists’ willingness to engage in extra-legal activity [ 3] also enables unique design opportunities—including the creation of socio-technical artifacts that maintain complicated, even parasitic relationships with existing infrastructure. For example,

activist communications projects often rely on corporate or academic bandwidth and machines that are utilized without their owners’ knowledge or permission.

Operating in the face of often overwhelming opposition also translates into a willingness to take risks and an acceptance of failure [ 4]. Activists generally expect their communications systems to fail, either through direct interference or technical snafu. Accordingly, designers place an emphasis on creating redundant systems. For example, activists will build websites, low-power FM stations, and SMS broadcast systems all to support a single protest to ensure that information continues to flow, even if one or more of those systems goes down.

Activist and mainstream design projects also structure relationships between designers, collaborators, and end users differently. Contestational designers consider their work to be a form of political activism that is motivated by personal commitment to an issue or cause. It is usually a volunteer activity, enabling designers to pick and choose their projects and collaborators at

will. Accordingly, contestational designers enjoy a greater degree of autonomy than many of their commercial counterparts.

The personal autonomy exercised by contestational designers is tempered by commitments to the individuals, organizations, and movements with whom they work. The bonds they form with their collaborators may run deeper than those between traditional designers, clients, and users. Relationships in commercial design projects are always adversarial to some degree. Regardless of intent, all parties are seen at least in part as potential sources of litigation and intellectual property disputes and must be kept at arm’s length. Relationships are formalized with contracts, nondisclosure agreements and so on. Activist relations, by contrast, tend to be predicated on notions of solidarity rather than structured by legal documents. Collaborators are fully engaged participants; intellectual property is meant to be widely disseminated, rather than locked up in patents. Relationships tend to outlast projects, with designers continuing to provide advice and