Samar Sabie
Cornell Tech, New York, New York, United States
Design has been used to contest existing socio-technical arrangements, provoke conversations around matters of concern, and operationalize radical theories such as agonism, which embraces difference and contention. However, the focus is usually on creating something new: a product, interface or artifact. In this paper, we investigate what happens when critical unmaking is deployed as a deliberate design strategy in an intergenerational, agonistic urban context. Specifically, we report on how youth in a six-week design internship used unmaking as a design move to subvert conventional narratives about their surrounding urban context. We analyze how this led to conflictual encounters at the local senior center, and compare it to the other, making-centric proposals which received favorable feedback but failed to raise the same important discussions. Through this ethnographic account, we argue that critical unmaking is important yet overlooked, and should be in the repertoire of design moves available for agonism and provocation.
https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3491102.3501930
The ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (https://chi2022.acm.org/)