Ever upload a photo of friends to your Facebook, only to have the system accurately identify those pictured and ask if you’d like to tag them? Thanks to DeepFace, this is becoming more common, as the social network creates what it has called “the largest facial dataset to date.” It is also, in layman’s terms, creepy as hell.
That was the scenario that Ewa Nowak found herself contemplating in 2017. At the time, she had recently graduated from the design department at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw, and she was in the process of cofounding NOMA, an industrial design firm she runs with partner Jarosław Markowitz. She began journaling about the idea of privacy and eventually sketched a series of ideas for workarounds.
“I was just amazed how they could identify our gender, age, and mood,” Nowak explains via an interpreter, remembering her initial driving curiosity. “But also how the development is constantly leveling up. I was surprised about how even if we have our face partially covered, how [face recognition] can still follow us and distinguish us.”
Much to her surprise, the Prince-like design was the first one Nowak tried and the first that worked. However, she experimented with numerous other iterations from her sketchbook, using paper to mimic the face-camouflaging dark and light spots, and then testing them by —what else?—uploading images to a Facebook gallery.
Her face jewelry recently won the Mazda Design Award at the Łódź Design Festival. It’s an elegant answer to a much-considered question of privacy, and a statement as much as a utilitarian device. In Warsaw, due to a recent influx of pollution, it’s become common for people to wear smog masks. Isn’t it rational to respond to the proliferation of public monitoring and facial recognition by protecting our vulnerable areas in a similar fashion?
“After two weeks, a reply came that they can’t accept it for political reasons,” Nowak explains. “It was a very firm refusal.”
Another lesson from her award-winning face shield: Being creative isn’t enough. You also need to consider when and how to present new ideas to the world.
“I worked on the [face jewelry] for two or three months, and then it waited,” Nowak says. “The reason I showed in Łódź is because there was a competition. I entered, and the project won. It’s the easiest way to get displayed. There’s so many projects stuck at the university level. When we were studying, a lot of people asked how to show their work to people and share ideas. Education and business are disconnected from art.”
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