Design and intervention in the age of “no alternative”

Abstract

This paper explores the relationship between design and intervention, and how scholars of computing and design might strengthen their repertoire of intervention amidst a pervasive sense of there being “no alternative” to structures of inequality and capitalist expansion. Drawing from the authors’ long-term ethnographic research on maker, entrepreneurship, and innovation cultures as well as their engagements with professional communities of computing and design, this paper introduces and theorizes modes of intervention that do not fit familiar images of political action such as the countercultural hero or localized resistance. The paper contributes by expanding the analytical repertoire of an interventionist-oriented social computing scholarship. Specifically, it offers three inter-related analytical sensibilities from feminist and critical race studies—“noticing differently,” “walking alongside” and “parasitic resistance”— to support political and activist approaches in CSCW and related fields1