Statement of Intent

To develop a mobile storytelling app that uses hand drawn illustration, fragmentation, and interaction design to expose how digital infrastructure, internet shutdowns, surveillance networks, and content moderation algorithms is weaponised during conflict. The project centres the voices of civilians, journalists, and aid workers made invisible by deliberate digital suppression, and positions design not as a neutral communicator but as a critical investigative tool.

My research examines how digital systems function as instruments of control during conflict, using Sudan (2023–present) as a live case study. Games such as Orwell: Keeping an Eye On You and Do Not Feed the Monkeys simulate surveillance from the operator's perspective, revealing how social media data, private messages, and personal records are weaponised, and how monitoring produces self-censorship and digital fear. Nicholas de Pencier's Black Code (2016) demonstrates that internet shutdowns and state. controlled infrastructure are not failures of technology but deliberate acts of control. The Cleaners (2018) exposes how platform moderation systems suppress conflict documentation, removing footage from Sudan as "graphic violence" while failing to preserve evidence or protect users. Across these sources a consistent framework emerges: technology in conflict does not simply break down, it is actively reshaped into a system of visibility and erasure. If information systems are never neutral, what responsibility does a designer carry when representing them?

FIGURE 2: Assignment 2