technical expertise to activist groups long after a particular project is completed.

Most significantly, contestational design projects proceed from a set of assumptions that diverge from the usual logics of communications technology development. While mainstream design emphasizes workplace productivity and consumer experience, activist innovation is generally concerned with personal empowerment, collective action, and non-hierarchical organizational models. As it happens, activist technology has directly influenced broader technical trends. For example, the international network of Indymedia sites built in the late 1990s and early 2000s inform open publishing platforms and the “citizen journalism” movement. Similarly, an SMS broadcast service called TXTmob that was created for protestors at the 2004 U.S. Republican National Convention helped inspire the development of Twitter and micro-blogging.

That activist technology would differ from and in some cases anticipate broader trends shouldn’t be surprising. By definition, activists are people for

whom existing social structures are somehow unsatisfying or inadequate. It is in their nature to continuously experiment with social form, innovating new organizational structures and new social relations. Activist communities have always developed extensive social practices and technologies that support alternative forms of social organization, including consensus-based decision making, non-hierarchical organizations, and affinity-based social networks. That these ideas have in recent years found widespread appeal in corporate, academic, and mass culture and are at the heart of many so-called Web 2.0 technologies demonstrates activists’

capacity for anticipating nascent but deeply felt social needs [ 5].

Finally, contestational designers challenge the way that design is positioned relative to the broader society in which it operates. Contestational designers are openly partisan practitioners who take sides in pressing issues of the day. They are neither objective technicians nor hired guns—images that continue to dominate the technical development community. Contestational

designers are autonomous agents, striving to unleash the full potential of their powers to advance agendas to which they are personally committed. Their collaborators are neither clients nor consumers, but full partners committed to ongoing struggles for human rights and social justice. The work may be unpaid, but it is deeply rewarding. As such, it should be an inspiration to designers everywhere.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Tad Hirsch is a research
scientist with the People
and Practices Research
group at Intel, where he
works on emerging tech-
nologies for natural resource management,
sustainable agriculture, and social move-
ments. He previously developed mobile
phone services for political activists at
MIT’s Media Lab, and taught in the digital
media department at the Rhode Island
School of Design. He has worked with
Motorola’s Advanced Concepts Group and
the Interaction Design Studio at Carnegie
Mellon University, and has several years’
experience in the nonprofit sector. Hirsch is
also a frequent collaborator with the
Institute for Applied Autonomy. He holds a
Ph.D. in media arts and sciences from MIT,
and an M.Des. in interaction design from
Carnegie Mellon University.

[ 5] It may also speak to some contestational designers’ ability to leverage skills honed by working on activist projects into influential positions in mainstream R&D organizations.

May + June 2009

DOI: 10.1145/1516016.1516024
© 2009 ACM 1072-5220/09/0500 $5.00