Description

For my anti-surveillance project I decided to create my own attempt at a defcon badge. Defcon is the world's largest cybersecurity, hacking, and pentesting conference. A Defcon 'badge' is a trend that was created by the attendees and the organizers of the conference. The badge consists of a pcb that is worn around the neck or on a keychain, and usually represents some kind of puzzle or pop-culture reference. Attendees will create their own badges to sell at the conference, these are the badges that are often made to look like pop-culture references. The organizers use the badges as a kind of puzzle for attendees to add a social element to some of the presentations. Badges are usually printed circuit boards that perform functions like lighting up, running code, or playing games. I chose to make my own concept of a badge, I based the design off of the popular 'incognito' logo for the chrome browser and the overall design was based on a NFC(near-field communication) tag.

I came to this design because the anti-surveillance prompt immediately made me think of hacker-culture. I knew about Defcon and the badges before the assignment.I had actually planned on going to the convention after finishing my undergraduate degree, before the events of 2020 and the global pandemic. I chose to design the badge for the attendees of defcon, or other hackathons. I wanted to make something that could be a discreet way of sharing information, one that did not rely on services that are easily surveilled like email or text messaging. I landed on using NFC because it would allow users to write messages on a device and store it on the badge to then transmit later to another device or another team member. I tried to recreate a NFC token to the best of my ability in p5.js, there are some nuances I would like to work more with, like getting more complex circuits in the drawing. I chose to use the 'Incognito' logo almost as a joke, because the actual incognito does almost nothing to protect users' privacy when browsing.

I think the choice to design for hacker culture was a good fit for this assignment. The only thing I think I could have done better would be how I showed the transmission of information. Right now if you press the button located on the bottom of the badge, it 'transmits' the information it is storing. I think if I were to make more changes I would add a device screen behind the badge to display the information being received. Apart from that I think it is a good concept for a tool that allows users to discreetly move and share information, away from the vulnerabilities that can be targeted on connected devices.