Eye Magazine

During the show, audience members were asked personal questions such as ‘do you volunteer?’ and ‘do you watch pornography?’. Sharing (or refusing to share) this information publicly, and seeing how others responded, proved to be an enlightening experience for the audience. Anyone using a smartphone will passively answer hundreds of similarly personal questions in the course of a single day’s browsing – often without a sense of awareness, control or ownership.

Wouter van Dijk, design director at Clever°Franke, observes that when artists approach these challenges, they tend to portray a ‘dark future’ via ‘design noir’. He believes that designers, unlike artists, should meet the challenges of technology with solutions rather than criticism: ‘Designers need to move beyond “all data is scary”, and look forward to how it can be applied – it’s here anyway, it’s part of our daily lives,’ he says.

Privacy Label is one such solution (and the winner of the Gold Jury prize at the 2019 European Design Awards). Taking inspiration from such initiatives as the European Union energy label, Clever°Franke hopes to create a universal visual language around privacy. Labels are designed to be displayed anywhere data is collected: from physical shopfronts and CCTV cameras, to websites and underground train ticket barriers.

Each ranking is calculated by answering a series of fifteen ‘yes’ or ‘no’ questions, grouped into three privacy categories: collection, usage and control. Each ‘yes’ answer contributes towards the total score, represented with a letter (from A to F) and colour (from green to red). A radial bar visualisation encloses the letter, with each filled bar representing a positive answer. The visual effect of this design is that better scoring labels appear more closed and protected.

Futurist and Wired co-founder Kevin Kelly has argued that ubiquitous surveillance is ‘inevitable’. Data collection and processing are, in his view, an inherent feature of the internet’s character. Today’s designers have an opportunity to address the problematic outcomes of this trend. As Clever°Franke’s work demonstrates, data privacy is about more than cookie pop-ups and impenetrable privacy policies. Our relationship with tracking technology has the potential to be simple, transparent and, one hopes, more symmetrical.

John Ridpath, writer, technologist, London

Eye is the world’s most beautiful and collectable graphic design journal, published for professional designers, students and anyone interested in critical, informed writing about graphic design and visual culture. It is available from all good design bookshops and online at the Eye shop, where you can buy subscriptions and single issues.