FEATURELearning from activists: lessons for designers

ist communications projects are described in Chandler, A. and Neumark, N. (eds), At a Distance: Precursors to Art and Activism on the Internet Cambridge: MIT Press, 2005. that, in some instances, anticipate broader technical trends. Contestational designers also offer new models of engaging with technology, people, and social issues that challenge implicit assumptions about how design operates. Activists have long been technology innovators, from the underground press to early experiments with neighborhood networking, low-power FM broadcast, and satellite television [1]. These efforts multiplied with the growth of Internet and mobile phone networks. There are now many examples of activist technology projects. Protest.net was an early online collaborative calendar that continues to list protests and activist events around the world. Riseup.net and Resist. ca have offered free, anonymous email and message boards for activists for nearly a decade. Environmental organizations such as Greenpeace have used GPS, aerial photography, and satellite imagery to document illegal logging and mining operations around the world. Tools like FrontlineSMS and Riottones enable groups to use text messaging and to create subversive mobile phone ringtones. There is also a tradition of arts-based activist technology development [2]. The Electronic Disturbance Theater’s FloodNet project explored distributed Over the past decade, a growing movement of politically engaged designers and engineers has been quietly building technical infrastructure for contemporary protest movements. The efforts of these “contestational designers” have largely gone unrecognized by the mainstream technology development community. A slew of articles and books in both the academic and popular press describe the impact of websites, blogs, mobile phones, and the like on political activism, but the dominant narrative assumes a nearly effortless transition between the appearance of new technologies and their adoption by activists. Technology use by activists is generally presented as simply another form of consumer behavior, analogous to other kinds of end-user adoption. Notably absent from this formulation is any accounting of the productive human labor involved in creating or adapting technologies to meet activist needs. The technical community in general, and interaction designers and computer-human interaction specialists in particular, can learn from contestational designers. Protest movements involve users, communities, and needs that differ from those faced by mainstream designers. Activist technology development’s unique context leads to innovative solutions denial-of-service attacks as an activist strategy. Artist and engineer Natalie Jeremijenko built robotic dogs that sniff out environmental contamination. The Institute for Applied Autonomy created robots that hand out subversive literature and spray paint graffiti on the street, as well as mapping software that allows activists to catalog CCTV surveillance camera locations. Projects like these contend with a unique set of design constraints. Activist technology projects often support immediate, short-lived campaigns and events. They are imbued with a sense of urgency stemming partly from the passion that motivates much political action, and partly from the highly contingent environment in which activist projects occur. Activists respond opportunistically to dynamic political, legal, and technical environments. Projects are undertaken in extremely compressed time frames, sometimes with no more than a few days or weeks between conception and realization. The immediacy of activist projects, coupled with a perpetual lack of funding, forces a kind of rough-and-tumble innovation. Contestational designers adopt highly fluid processes. They learn to quickly identify and exploit short-lived opportunities. Tactics and technologies often develop in Learning from Activists: Lessons for Designers