AWARD YEAR
2021
CATEGORY
Body
GOALS
Balance Human & Artificial Intelligence
KEYWORDS
Recognizable, privacy, design
COUNTRY
Poland
DESIGNED BY
Ewa Nowak
WEBSITE
https://noma-studio.pl/en/
Incognito
The jewelry is against face-recognition intrusions
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 Jaros?aw 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, 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.”