To be presented at DIY Citizenship: Critical Making and Social Media. University of Tornoto. November 12-14, 2010.

Resilience, the ability of a system to withstand disruption or return to operation after a shock, has been offered as a solution to the problem of cascading failures in infrastructural systems. However, the move from concepts of resilience to their implementation is problematic because of the symbiosis between political authority and large technical systems, which often acts as an obstacle to adaptation or change. DIY approaches to infrastructural resilience emerge as a viable response to these bureaucratic and institutional obstacles.

In this presentation I will propose an overview and classification of “DIY Infrastructure” projects. Through such projects, DIY infrastructure can be treated as a mode of critical making, which offers novel opportunities to examine practices of DIY citizenship.

Non-Anthropocentrism and the Non-Human In Design

An investigation of the implications of non anthropocentric perspectives on design and design research. From the forthcoming book From Social Butterfly to Engaged Citizen, from MIT Press. Co-written with Carl DiSalvo.

presented at the Digital Cities workshop at the International Conference on Communities and Technology at Penn State University, Jun 24-26th. An initial presentation of the ongoing work of the Public Design Workshop with Atlanta’s Youth Art Connection.

Smog is Democratic

with Carl DiSalvo. Included as part of the exhibit Consequential Matters at the Global Health Odyssey Museum, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, June 15 – September 11, 2009.

Impurely Accidental

presented at Digital art and music: the happy accident, International Digital Media and Arts Association Conference, Philadelphia, PA, 2007.