Dec 12

Headgear to thwart mind-reading surveillance cameras by Fabrica researchers

Posted in: headgear, slideshows, surveillance, Wearable Futures, wearable technology

Researchers at Italian design centre Fabrica have created accessories that would deceive neuroimaging devices by diverting thoughts using electric shocks and flashing lights (+ slideshow).

Wearable anti-NIS accessories by Fabrica

Lisa Kori Chung and Caitlin Morris from Fabrica designed the anti-NIS (neuroimaging surveillance) pieces to detect when surveillance technology linked to CCTV cameras is trying to read the wearer’s brainwaves. It would then focus their thoughts to something inconsequential to help maintain privacy.

Wearable anti-NIS accessories by Fabrica

They say neuroimaging technology is currently being researched and developed to read and record the thoughts of the public, with the aim to detect ill intentions before they are carried out.

Wearable anti-NIS accessories by Fabrica_dezeen_2

However this raises issues of privacy, so Kori Chung and Morris are proposing to mask thoughts using a range of wearable devices.

Wearable anti-NIS accessories by Fabrica

Each faceted piece covered with decorative patterns is designed to detect when the wearer is being scanned and provides a distraction to change their thought pattern.

“Rather than simply blocking access to the brain, which would require unsubtle and complex equipment, each piece proposes a method of momentary cognitive diversion,” said the designers.

Wearable anti-NIS accessories by Fabrica

“When a scan is detected, the accessories provoke a sensory reaction that will demand the wearer’s attention, changing their current brain activity patterns and affording a moment of privacy through camouflage.”

The hat transmits sound pulses through the skull to the ear, the collar gives a gentle electric shock and the mask emits light flashes into the wearer’s eyes.

Wearable anti-NIS accessories by Fabrica

This means that at the moment of the scan, the wearer’s thoughts are more likely to be read as “this light is too bright” or “that’s a strange sound” rather than what their mind might have been preoccupied with otherwise.

Even though the implementation of neuroimaging technology is still science fiction, the project aims to raise awareness of other surveillance techniques currently used in conjunction with CCTV such as facial recognition, motion detection and voice analysis.

Wearable anti-NIS accessories by Fabrica

The project was designed for the Futures 10 exhibition of wearable technology, displayed last night as part of the Wearable Futures conference at Ravensbourne in London.

On the same theme of masking surveillance, Adam Harvery created a range of anti-drone clothing to hide the wearer from heat detection technologies.

Photographs are by Marco Zanin.

Here’s some information the designers sent to us:

Wearables to thwart neuroimaging surveillance by Lisa Kori Chung and Caitlin Morris

The paradigm of clothing as protector and concealer is slowly shifting: increasingly, our bodies are becoming more and more public (though security practices as well as fashion choices), while new forms of neuro-imaging technology are developing that may one day allow for surveillance and interception of the contents of our minds. Anti-NIS Accessories is a series of proposed objects designed as a form of clothing that maintains privacy of thought and action.

Wearable anti-NIS accessories by Fabrica

Rather than simply blocking access to the brain, which would require unsubtle and complex equipment, each piece proposes a method of momentary cognitive diversion. When a scan is detected, the accessories provoke a sensory reaction that will demand the wearer’s attention, changing their current brain activity patterns and affording a moment of privacy through camouflage. The objects include a hat that transmits sound pulses through bone conduction, a collar that gives a gentle electric shock and a mask that distracts the user with flashing lights.

Can the purpose of clothing be expanded to serve a hybrid purpose: acting as an expressive covering of the body, and also maintaining privacy of things like emotions, intelligence, and even more specific “brain data”?

Wearable anti-NIS accessories by Fabrica

These are the wider questions we asked:

Today, closed-circuit video surveillance has become commonplace. Concurrent with its rise in ubiquity, new techniques are being developed for analysing the massive amounts of information generated. Biometric identification techniques such as FRT (facial recognition technology), gait analysis, and voice analysis are often used after an incident has taken place to try to determine the identities of the parties involved. However, now various companies are working on algorithms to detect persons acting “suspiciously” (perhaps based on activities such as running, loitering and carrying packages). We are entering a new period of algorithmic guessing of intention based on external behaviours, before an incident takes place.

What if brain-scanning could be periodically deployed in a widespread and stealthy manner in urban environments, similar to CCTV now? Already our notions of civil liberties and bodily privacy are being challenged on an everyday basis, how should they be defined in the future in terms of the mind?

The post Headgear to thwart mind-reading surveillance
cameras by Fabrica researchers appeared first on Dezeen.

No Comments | Tags: , , ,
Oct 10

“Product design should do so much more than encourage consumption”

Posted in: Kieran Long, Opinion, surveillance

"Product design should do so much more than encourage consumption"

Opinion: in his latest column, Kieran Long argues that product designers should learn from architects and tackle civic issues like surveillance and security rather than “hide in their studios making something lovely.”

When was the last time you met a designer whose work is about justice or love, or truth? Universal values, ones that bear on the meaning of our lives, seem to be beyond the creative register of most designers of objects and things. In product design, I’m struck by how small the concerns of its practitioners tend to be.

I began thinking about this while teaching at the Royal College of Art in the Design Products department in 2011/12 with the designer Sofia Lagerkvist from Front Design. Our students were great and we loved working there, but when we set a brief that asked our students to work in north-east London libraries after the riots, there was noticeable resistance. There was a sense of some (not all) students imagining that this was not what they came to the RCA to do, and that it was not what they wanted their careers to be.

The conflict was certainly my fault. I found it difficult to have this conversation with them, because I’d never encountered this line of thinking in many years of teaching in architecture schools. It seemed self evident to me that such a brief was valuable. Architects do actually spend time thinking about a higher meaning for their work beyond the commercial and outside the simple “I like/I don’t” like paradigm of individual taste.

For architects, their education (ideally) gives students a sense of certain (yet often very vague) responsibility to the city itself and therefore that the citizen is important.

Architects will almost always speak about their higher role if given the chance: about their responsibility to provide a setting for civic life, to make a place meaningful for people and so on. Our cities might not be better because of it, but the conversation is there.

I’m not saying architects are uniquely civic minded in their work, either. We can think of plenty of works of digital design (games, websites, even interfaces) that take as their themes issues of access, citizenship, or even life or death. Graphic design does, too, through political posters and publications and many practitioners’ interest in the graphic culture of the streets.

In product design, however, sometimes it feels that its most important practitioners just want to be left alone to whittle away in their studios making something lovely, periodically being wheeled out to tell the story of their whittling.

The obvious retort to this is probably that product design is indeed the field most in bed with fast-moving consumer capitalism. The Ron Arads and so on of this world give salesmen new, beautiful and desirable things to sell, and that machine is necessary. Also, the media around design – with its systems of awards and juries and the institutions (like mine) that honour the good and great – are not all that interested in the world of design beyond the decorative. Honourable exceptions include the work of people like Justin McGuirk in the Domus of recent years. In the main, the role models we promote are those engaged with consumer products.

I know many designers whose work articulates our everyday experience in ways that are meaningful, that help us to understand and enjoy our daily lives. It is enough for good design to be things we cherish because they are beautiful, well made, or a pleasure to use, but it seems to me that our daily lives are dominated by barely competent and sometimes downright sinister works of industrial design, and I do not understand why designers don’t spend more time chasing down these opportunities. I mean, I hate the yellow plastic pad that I have to slide my Oyster Card up against when I get on the tube in the morning, and the ugly yellow system of handles and railings on London buses. I hate the incompetent way that cathedrals integrate gift shops into their lobbies and the excessive bulk of the common-or-garden wheelie bin.

More important, though, is whether there are any Dezeen readers whose work involves designing bits of the Ring of Steel terrorist defences around the City of London, or truckproof bollards, crowd-management barriers, riot-police shields, the casings for CCTV cameras, or the plastic spikes that they stick on top of the CCTV cameras to stop birds shitting on them.

The whole infrastructure of security and surveillance that dominates our experience of the city today (to take just one example) has gone untouched by the field of product design in any meaningful way. These are works of design that take justice and trust as their topic, and they make it pretty clear how those in power think of us as citizens.

Architects are often thought of as terrible snobs, but loads of them spend their days thanklessly trying to redesign low-cost housing for grasping, couldn’t-care-less developers or vainly trying to improve the standard of big-shed retail. Perhaps product designers dislike getting their hands dirty.

If the best we can say of a designed object is that they people can either buy it or not buy it, then the piece is nothing. It is worse than nothing, it just exists to make the wheels of a corporation turn, to encourage consumption and so on. Let’s be honest about that. I know that we all depend on this system working, it pays most of our wages etc etc, but let’s not pretend it’s why we get out of bed in the morning. Design could be so much more important than that. I just wonder if designers have the passion and desire to go out and design the things that define our lives as citizens and human beings.

Kieran Long is Senior Curator of Contemporary Architecture, Design and Digital at the Victoria & Albert Museum. He presents Restoration Home and the series The £100,000 House for the BBC, and is currently the architecture critic for the Evening Standard newspaper.

The post “Product design should do so much more
than encourage consumption” appeared first on Dezeen.

No Comments | Tags: ,
Jun 23

Stealth Wear by Adam Harvey

Posted in: surveillance

This range of anti-drone clothing was created by New York designer Adam Harvey to hide the wearer from heat detection technologies.

Stealth Wear by Adam Harvey

Drones, also known as unmanned aerial vehicles, can be equipped with thermal imaging cameras and deployed by the military or police to locate individuals using heat signatures. The metallic fibres in Harvey‘s lightweight garments reflect heat, masking the wearer’s thermal signature and rendering them undetectable.

Stealth Wear by Adam Harvey

Three pieces make up the collection including a zip up cape with a peaked hat, which almost completely cloaks the body, and a scarf that can be draped where needed. “Conceptually, these garments align themselves with the rationale behind the traditional hijab and burqa: to act as ‘the veil which separates man or the world from God,’ replacing God with drone,” says Harvey.

Stealth Wear by Adam Harvey

The cropped hoodie is designed to cover the head and shoulders, areas that would be exposed to drones overhead. Pieces were designed in collaboration with New York fashion designer Johanna Bloomfield. All images are copyright Adam Harvery/ahprojects.com.

Stealth Wear by Adam Harvey

In his lastest opinion column, Sam Jacob discusses how US surveillance programme PRISM and the impact of digital culture are influencing design thinking.

Stealth Wear by Adam Harvey

Our other stories about design based on surveillance include eavesdropping devices that were presented at an exhibition in Israel and lights modelled on security cameras.

See more design for surveillance »
See more fashion design »

The post Stealth Wear by
Adam Harvey appeared first on Dezeen.

No Comments | Tags: , ,