Anti-Surveillance Tool
Description
For this project, we were to use the principles of steganography to encode a secret message that can be decoded through instructions. Additionally, we needed incorporate looping and nested looping into this assignment.
Design Process
Before I decided to make a career change, I worked for a number of government organizations and a think tank. The latter of which introduced me to the concept of the school-to-prison pipeline. This concept highlights the tendency of minors from disadvantaged backgrounds to get incarcerated from increasingly stringent school policies. My thought for this project was to incorporate the idea of passing a note in school. The idea was to have the message reach a demographic that would otherwise be unaware of the issue, middle-class to upper middle-class students. This scenario assumes that the students have a system that requires a tool to read their notes (in this case a red light.) For this design I created a fake report card of an exemplary student who shows great school spirit and makes straight A's. I knew I wanted to incorporate the steganographic technique of an anaglyph or invisible ink in this project. To receive the real message highlighting the issue of school disciplinary policies, press down and move your mouse across the image. I think these techniques are fitting because no one wants their message read out loud by the teacher, and if this particular message were to be read out loud the student passing the message would likely face some sort of further disciplinary action for questioning school policies. Additionally, I decided to incorporate a for loop technique to develop the graph in the background. The idea being that a student was in math class when they made and passed this note.
Reflection
I really enjoyed this assignment and applying my past work to my present work. School policies are talked about every so often when someone gets sent home for wearing short shorts, dying their hair, or getting fired for having too many tattoos. These stories only start brief conversations on slow news days, but there's a deeper issue here that's being largely ignored. Much more minority students are either getting suspended, arrested, and/or sent to reformatory programs for similar innocuous reasons which set them down a track that limits their futures. Overall, I'm pretty happy with how the visual product turned out. I'd prefer the text to be completely invisible but I think an anaglyph gets the point across really well since the concepts are similar.