Anti-Surveillance Tool

Instruction

Click mouse to start

The format of coordinate is row,column

The coordinate is assigned as 17,22

Every click will trigger a new character in the assigned coordinate

Write down each character till the recoginization of certain pattern

Reverse the order of pattern, and then the message could be read

Reflection

The idea I choose was inspired from the method of exchanging secret information during the time when Japan had a invasive war to China. The original method is to encode the secret information into a regular letter. The person who receives the letter uses an opaque decode card that has holes in certain positions, and characters appeared through those holes are the secret information needed to be delivered.

I further developed this idea to current digital era. I created a 29 by 29 matrix that composed with completely random characters, but only one of the coordinate in matrix is deployed with the message I would like to convey. As the whole matrix is in digital form, the way to interact with the decode card can be various, such as click. Every click on the matrix would trigger the refresh of whole matrix, which means every character would randomly regenerate except the message coordinate. Every refresh would proceed to the next characters of the message, and keep clicking till the recognize of the repeat pattern of the message. The last step is to reverse the order characters recorded from the message coordinates to have the correct message.

The scenario would be like I hand out this digital matrix card to the receipt, and assign him a coordinate, [17, 22] (row by column), to track characters of message. After the first click, the matrix would be generated and write down the first character appeared in [17, 22], for instance, n. Repeat the click until the receipt recognize the pattern.

[n u f s i e d o c n u f s i e d o c n u f s i e d o c…..].
[n u f s i e d o c]

And reverse the order of the pattern, then the message is [c o d e i s f u n ].

During the war time, spy modified their looks to disguise the actual identity. The forms of design were centralized with disguise and the prevention from exposing actual identity. Nowadays, the basic and meanwhile the most important design principle aims to define the correct problems and fulfill the needs of users. Identity or interest then becomes target audience, and design is dramatically shifted to user-centered.

The visual strategy is to setup as many as possible of disturbance items to disguise the message. Also the reverse order of the message is to add a dual fail-safe to avoid leaking. The matrix could expand to 290*290, 2900*2900…. As long as the receipt have the coordinate, the receipt is able to read message from this massive random matrix.