Carl DiSalvo, Professor, School of Interactive Computing, Georgia Tech

Abstract: For a long time, people have asked how design can shape social and political change. Usually, the answer is found in outcomes—the products, systems, or artifacts designers create. But what if the real power of design isn’t just in what gets made, but in how designers work with people along the way? What if we looked less at outputs and more at relationships? In this talk, we explore accompaniment. It’s both an idea and a practice—one that invites us to see design and research differently, by paying attention to the character of the relationships between designers and the people they work with. Accompaniment opens the door to a more caring, accountable, and transformative way of doing design.

Bio: Carl DiSalvo is a Professor in School of Interactive Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology. He serves on the steering committee for the AIAI Network, a multi-institution endeavor investigating how the humanities might help us enlist AI ethically, equitably, and in the service of justice, funded by the Mellon Foundation. From 2024-2025 he was the James Wei Visiting Professor at Princeton University. DiSalvo’s research explores how design fosters and thwarts democratic participation, and how communities use and resist data while working toward social change. Throughout his work, he draws together concepts and practices from art and design, and the humanities and social sciences to interpret and make socio-technical systems. He is committed to engaged scholarship and partners with communities, civil society, government, and industry throughout his work. DiSalvo regularly publishes in design, science and technology studies, and human-computer interaction journals and conference proceedings. He’s published two books with MIT Press, Adversarial Design (2012) and Design as Democratic Inquiry (2022). He is a co-editor of the journal Design Issues. In 2025 he was inducted into the SIGCHI Academy for his contributions to the field of Human-Computer Interaction. In 2025 he was also awarded the STS Infrastructure Award from the Society for the Social Studies of Science, as a co-editor of the DigitalSTS Handbook.