POWER! NOT PANIC
Power! Not Panic is a series of workshops organized by a loose collective created with my TAT-lab colleagues Sarah Fox and Daniela Rosner. These workshops incorporate basic circuit design within protest posters, buttons, and dissident messaging. By integrating the tools of technology with the intimate and handmade, we seek to imagine different circumstances for the professional and political contexts where technology is created.
Our pictorial Crafting Everyday Resistance Through Lightweight Design (PDF) was published in the proceedings of the 2020 conference on Designing Interactive Systems and awarded a Best Paper Honorable Mention. A publicly accessible and brief 10-minute video presentation of this work can be viewed on Youtube.
Crafting Everyday Resistance Through Lightweight Design
This pictorial offers a way of thinking about academic design communities differently — thinking about them as invested, responsible to, embedded in, and resources for larger social movements. This perspective calls on scholars to do more than point at problems and walk away. Instead, it asks us to mobilize with the materials and practices at hand within professional or academic contexts.
Our pictorial uses the style of a zine to visualize the work of transforming design culture. Our collaborator, Francesca Spektor designed collages of historical and cultural imagery to display how methods of (what we call) “lightweight design” have long been materialized as part of protest movements. Lightweight design practices leverage materials that are widely available in academic design settings as tools for expression and resistance. This pictorial reflects on a series of workshops within departments and labs that prize creation and innovation to become “inventive” in the way suggested by feminist scholar Sara Ahmed: through claiming space, time and materials for speaking out. Our pictorial sets out to be kind of path in for talking about these practices as legitimate and necessary design activities.
Glimmers & Half-Built Projects
Written for the "Design Inquiry" forum in the ACM Magazine, Interactions. Read here.
The imperfectly executed ideas. The things we build that don't work out. The projects we begin but never quite polish into a final form. These failures are all around us. And, recently people in technology industries have talked a lot about their value. We're encouraged to "fail forward" to "fail fast" and "fail better."
But, failure can be more than just learning the hard way—more than an informative experience to be left behind, in the pursuit of better outcomes. They're real glimpses of other futures. Taking these glimmers & half-built projects seriously requires new ways of valuing design projects. With my collaborators Sarah Fox and Kristin Dew, we explore what this might look like in a feminist button making workshop hosted at the UW MakerSpace.
Disobedient Electronics
Disobedient Electronics: Protest is a zine by Garnet Hertz that is a collection of projects using DIY technologies to confront political issues. We designed a sticker insert that was distributed with paper copies of the zine. Inspired by a poster making workshop we organized for the 2016 Women's March on Seattle, the sticker depicts a woman in protest holding a sewing needle in a raised fist.
The full PDF of the zine can be found here.
