I published a new essay over at HiLobrow on the evolution and symbolism of the Guy Fawkes mask in Anonymous and protest culture. If you're interested in how symbols work within protest movements, or Anonymous culture, please do check it out!

"Anonymous is one face of a broad anti-authoritarian, pro-freedom sentiment; its iconic mask symbolizes both that movement’s ends, its means (individuals collected as a single entity), and the right to anonymous public political participation. The use of the Guy Fawkes mask suggests a movement with an infinitely reproducible identity, a fractal movement via which individuals or small cells can operate and act — for better or worse, hopefully the former — with the power of the whole."

This week in Co-Design I'm looking at the field of Participatory Design. Participatory Design has a much more establish history than most of the other sub-genres of co-design I've been looking at. It had its start in Scandinavia in the 1970's, emerging from trade union movements. It shares an ideological lineage with Sociotechnical Design and Action research. Initially, the goal of Participatory Design was to shift the stance of technology from one which inherently favored management and entrenched power structures to one which favored and worked with the workers. Given the theory's avowedly political beginnings, a good question to keep in mind as we continue to think about participatory is whether or not it has kept its ideological commitment to the democratization of technology since its conception. In order to be called "participatory design," must a project undertake the political goals of the theory's founders? Is this political stance what is necessary to differentiate it from other theories of co-design?

In today's episode of the Co-Design Lit Review, I'm looking at the Collaborative Design space. I noticed something interesting while working on this week's chapter. The term "collaborative design" is most predominantly used to refer to the use of multi-disciplinary design teams and not explicitly to community involvement in the design process. Because of this, there is a lot of interesting work in the collaborative design space on topics like conflict resolution and work flow. Though the Co-Design project is most closely focused on direct community engagement with design processes (and thus focuses on issues that occur when non-professionals are brought into the design process), these other issues, though framed in a professionalized context, are still very relevant.

As part of the Co-Design Toolkit project, I'll be posting weekly entries about the different design methodologies that together make up the Co-Design space. This week's episode: Human Centered Design! I'll be examining IDEO's popular Human Centered Design Toolkit, some use case studies, and criticism of the methodology.

Early on the morning of October 11, the Boston PD arrested over 100 people who were part of the #OccupyBoston camp. Oliver Day has posted a recording of police scanner activity from that night to SoundCloud, where it's been getting some great annotating attention. Being able to establish a timeline of events for that night is extremely helpful from academic, legal and logistical perspectives. If you've got any info on the events of Tuesday night, please contribute to the annotation. Everyone else, check it out!

If you know of any other police scanner recordings, either referencing the Boston camp or other #Occupy camps, please leave links in the comments!