Designing Against Disinformation: The Designer as Mediator | Rémi Opalinski (Bureau 1217)

Can design be a form of investigation? Interaction designer, design researcher and teacher Rémi Opalinski tells how he built a guide and tools against disinformation with researchers, a war reporter and young people, and what it means for a designer to act as a mediator. DECODE (Decode, Co-create and Debate) was initiated by the Albert Hirschman Centre on Democracy at the Geneva Graduate Institute. During five workshops led by a war reporter covering Ukraine, participants aged 18 to 26 explored troll farms, deepfakes, astroturfing and echo chambers, and imagined tools to counter them. Rémi then had to turn this scattered material into a coherent guide and three tools, without letting the disinformation he showed circulate once again. In this talk: – Design as investigation: from the Cyberfeminism Index to Formafantasma’s Cambio – Cultural probes: investigating alongside a journalist – Showing disinformation without spreading it: a systematic visual treatment – A guide built as a database, with several ways in – Three tools: a map of disinformation campaigns, a bot and troll account analyser, a source-reliability browser extension – Why designers need technological literacy: data, APIs, privacy, choice of tools Rémi Opalinski is an interaction designer, design researcher and teacher. With his studio, he works on commissions for cultural clients and on research projects. Chapters 00:00 Can design be a form of investigation? 01:13 References: Cyberfeminism Index, Formafantasma 03:40 From interaction design to journalism 08:40 The DECODE project 12:15 Workshops: troll farms, deepfakes, astroturfing 18:14 Showing disinformation without spreading it 21:30 A guide built as a database 29:32 Three tools against disinformation 37:01 Designers and technological literacy 39:36 Q&A: how technical should designers be? 42:57 Q&A: design process and hypotheses Recorded on Thursday 1 October 2026 at L’École de design Nantes Atlantique (Nantes, France), during Design for Medias 2026: two days of talks on design in the media, organised by the school’s Media Design lab. Full programme: https://www.mediadesignlab.fr/actuali... Media Design lab: https://www.lecolededesign.com/fr/rec... L’École de design Nantes Atlantique: https://www.lecolededesign.com #DesignForMedias #Disinformation #InteractionDesign