Design Fiction

Design Friction Meets Digital Confinement

In 2023, designers Léa Lippera and Bastien Kerspern from Design Friction in Nantes, Henry Mainsah from Oslo Metropolitan and Carolina Sanchez Boe developed a toolkit and initiated a series of workshops on speculative futures, which are inspired by the massification of so-called “alternative to detention technologies”, such as electronic shackles and facial recognition app SmartLINK, deployed on migrants and asylum seekers in the USA.

The toolkit, designed and prototyped by Léa and Bastien, serves as a basis to develop speculative scenarios in which digital detention technologies are deployed to serve the common good, and more specifically to reach the UN Sustainable Development Goals. The scenarios raise many ethical issues, starting with more surveillance, exploitation and control of individuals, citizens and communities. During the second part of the workshops, we imagine various opposition modes and strategies to face, subvert or fight the technologies on a daily basis.

The toolkit and workshop were developed thanks to generous funding from SHAPE – Shaping Digital Citizenship, Aarhus University and were based on Boe’s research project “Digital Confinement”, funded by Carlsbergfondet.

The workshops brought together gifted and creative interdisciplinary groups of participants from civil society and from academia, counting, among others, Camille Arnodin, Sarah-Louise Mortensen, Catrine Sundorf Kristensen, Steen Andersen, Simon Sønderbo Nielsen, Nicolas Baya-Laffite, Steffen Köhn, Magdalena Tyzlik-Carver, Vincent Joos, Darren Byler, Sophia Goodfriend, Ulla Berg, Karina Horsti, Andi Stoiber, Robbert Dilemma, Ana Ballesteros Pena, and Christian Poulsen.

The workshops were launched in June 2023 by an inspiring keynote by designers Léa Lippera and Bastien Kerspern from Design Friction in Nantes gave an inspiring keynote “A 101 Conference on Design Fiction. Designing Cautionnary Tales to Open Futures (and Close Others)”which can be viewed here:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1mk8zzd4q8Ylxr4jq90Dl0Xfi53rp18Nn/view?usp=sharing

“A 101 Conference on Design Fiction. Designing Cautionnary Tales to Open Futures (and Close Others)”. Léa Lippera and Bastien Kerspern from Design Friction in Nantes, June 2023, Interacting Minds Center

Gratitude to Christian Poulsen, who filmed and edited the video, to Interacting Minds Center which hosted the event, and to SHAPE – Shaping Digital Citizenship at Aarhus University for generous funding.

The toolkit designed for these workshops will be refined and published for further open speculations, as we aim to foster debates on the stakes of digital confinement technologies.

Read more about Léa’s and Bastien’s impressive work here: https://design-friction.com