Projects / Representations of security

Overview

Remember when Senator Ted Stevens said the Internet was a “series of tubes?” Well, back in the 90s, people talked a lot about the “information superhighway.” Do a Google image search for that phrase. You’ll see a lot of tubes.

The way we represent technical concepts visually shapes how people understand them, which in turn affects how and why decisions are made. This initiative both critically analyzes representations of security, and shifts them through interventions and provocations.

Adversary Personas
Adversary Personas is an improvisational role-playing game designed to help teams think broadly and creatively about their cybersecurity threats. It aims to create more specific, human-centered ways of representing security threats, and to draw new kinds of people into the practice of security: designers, activists, project managers, and more.

Links

Adversary Personas

Play the game

Current Project Team

Nick Merrill

Director

Joanne Ma

Research Assistant

Kyra Baffo

Research Assistant

Contact information
Nick Merrill - ffff at berkeley dot edu
Arts Program

Where our Cybersecurity Imagery project seeks to understand security’s visual representations, our arts program seeks to expand and refine them. Proposals were judged by Kelani Nichole, Ronald Rael, and Rhonda Holberton.

Links

Arts Event 3: "SweetWire" with Greg Niemeyer & Sydney Skybetter (September 16, 2020)

Watch a recording

Arts Event 2: "Virtual Caring" with Lauren McCarthy & Salome Asega (July 15, 2020)

Watch a recording

Arts Event 1: "The Price is Wrong" with Shayna Robinson & Neema Iyer (June 10, 2020)

Watch a recording

2019 Arts Contest Cohort

Explore all the winning projects
Contact information
Nick Merrill - ffff at berkeley dot edu
Cybersecurity Imagery

How is “cybersecurity” represented visually? Working with a set of images collected from two years of Google Image Search queries, this project seeks to better understand our representations of cybersecurity and how they affect the ways we think and act. Using machine learning and other big-data techniques together with qualitative methods, we're building a nuanced understanding of where security's representations are today—and how to push them forward for tomorrow.

Links

Cybersecurity Imagery Dataset

Explore the dataset

Past Team Members

Anna Shang

Research Assistant

Contact information
Nick Merrill - ffff at berkeley dot edu