The consideration of sensitivity analysis of integral functionals with respect to shape parameters arises in many situations where a geometrical domain plays a primary role; shape optimization and inverse problems are the most obvious, as well as possibly the most important, of such instances. In addition to numerical differentition, shape sensitivities can be evaluated using either a direct differentiation or the adjoint variable approach [10, 19], the present paper being focused on the latter. Besides, consideration of shape changes in otherwise linear problems makes it very attractive to use boundary integral equation (BIE) formulations, which constitute the minimal modelling as far as the geometrical support of unknown field variables is concerned.