Cade is a designer, writer and researcher who focuses on weaponised design, identity, infrastructure and politics. After prototyping Signal with Open Whisper Systems, he's spent six years leading design teams focused on secure software and emerging cryptocurrency technologies. He was Chief Creative Officer at SpiderOak, a Snowden-approved cloud storage company, researching new approaches to web of trust and design-led digital security. Since 2017, he is the Design Lead at Tactical Tech and resides in Berlin, Germany.
Essays
Shrinking Civil Space
On Weaponised Design
Protocols and Governance: Exploring the relationship between decentralised infrastructure and the politics of their communities
Products
Txt: a small word processor that keeps your work safe with well-documented encryption.
Timeline (chronological)
Tactical Tech Lite
An automated infrastructure project that makes Tactical Tech's work accessible to all audiences, particularly in adversarial situations, in places with poor connectivity, or unusual or difficult to support hardware. Read more about this via the press release. In collaboration with Laurent Dellere, Jacopo Anderlini and Danja Vasiliev.
Weaponised Design: An Investigative Workshop
Debut of a new participatory Weaponised Design workshop, in which participants explore the politics of design by investigating and exploiting publicly available algorithms. Completed in collaboration with Tactical Tech and Kings College Faculty of Digital Humanities.
Design Ethics @ Speculative Futures, Berlin
A guest lecture at Speculative Futures on how 'design ethics' threatens to neutralize both the critique of outcomes and to limit the potentials of design speculation to contribute to a radically reimagined world.
Web of Trust Introduction to PGP and Key-Signing Party
An arts-tech focused introduction to Web of Trust and PGP (Pretty Good Privacy), tracing its origins to the early cypherpunk movement. Supported an introductory PGP key-signing Cryptoparty. With Sarah Friend, Cory Levinson and Sam Hart. Held at Trust.
Fast Company: Apple created the privacy dystopia it wants to save you from
Quote from a larger discussion with Fast Company about how the economics of app store ecosystems foster data surveillance, and why legislation and prohibition of data brokerage alone is not the answer.
Something Or Other: LCC Lecture Series
Guest lecture at the London College of Communication on how 'Design Ethics' prevents deep examination of systemic inequalities and power structures.
Tactical Tech: Organisation Rebrand
Fifteen year rebrand of Tactical Tech – a berlin-based NGO, with a focus on unifying the organisation's aesthetics and capturing the creativity of the organisation's many team members. With Daisy Kidd, Ida Flik and Philipp Dollinger at Tactical Tech.
Transmediale 2019: Phantasms of Decentralization? Conversations about Commoning with Coming Media
Participation in "a speculative conversation about a more radical commoning using recent and forthcoming information technologies, including the entanglement of technologies with alternative forms of living together from different scales and levels, such as networking (goods, communication), decision making, predicting/modelling, automation driven post-scarcity economies, tracking, and negotiating situated value."
The Data Detox Kit
Project lead for an influential 8 day project that raises public awareness of surveillance capitalism, helps people critically analyse the role of data collection in their lives, and aids them in limiting or removing themselves from these surveillance systems.
BBC Click: Data detox for the new year
Interview with the BBC about the Data Detox Kit, and whether people can fight back against algorithms.
New Models Episode 9: Stacks Attack
An interview with New Models. Covers the collateral (human) damage platforms cause as they scale; questions big tech's G-rated ideation of the average subject; considers the functionality of personal mobile devices within precarious communities, and remarks on the actual inefficiency of the cloud. (With Busta, Keller, & @LILINTERNET)
DACIDA Talks: On Weaponised Design
A livestream talk for DACIDA, an online community that gathers creative, open-minded fellows with the goal of exploring, sharing experiences and starting a dialogue about what it means to be an artist in the 21st century. Organised by the NGO "Gradska Gerila" with the support of the Goethe-Institut Belgrade.
Radical Networks
A longer talk about Weaponised Design at Radical Networks – a festival and a conference designed to foster critical discussions around policy, DIY networking and the future of the Internet.
Hyper Island
Guest lecture at Hyper Island's Stockholm campus about weaponised design, and the greater politics of infrastructure.
User Agent: If everything is so smooth, then why I am so sad?
Interview for Anastasia Kubrak's post-graduate thesis. Critical reflection on the responsibilities, failures and challenges of design teams.
Ghost in the Machine
A talk on Weaponised Design alongside complementary talks on Live Action Role Play by Susan Ploetz, and artificial intelligence ethics by Joshua Johnson.
Data Detoxing with Tactical Tech
Podcast interview with Lawrence Ampofo on the importance of minimizing data footprints on common Silicon Valley platforms.
“It’s never too late”: detoxing your digital life
A Data Detox Kit focused interview with NPR, explaining the focus of the project and the individual implications for limiting data collection by corporate surveillance platforms.
Ethics and Technology - Why is it important?
A panel exploring trends in technology and their ethical, moral, and societal implications. Alongside Yann Leretaille and Alexander Steinhart, the panel covered topics including privacy, digital culture, morality of machine-based decision-making and implications of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).
XYZ
Design direction for a the XYZ project, a space to publish practical tools to navigate digital security and privacy from a gender perspective, in collaboration with Semanur Karaman.
Efficiency and Madness Postgraduate Semester
Co-developed and lectured the winter 2017/2018 semester of Universität Potsdam's Designschule post-graduate programme. With Stephanie Hankey, Marek Tuszynski and Varoon Bashyakarla.
CoinJar Exchange
Creative and design direction for a professional cryptocurrency trading platform and related branding. In collaboration with Ignatius Gilfedder.
SpiderOak.com
Creative direction for SpiderOak and its suite of products. A two year focus on design research within an information security context, covering the entire company's communications, strategy and products. In collaboration with photographer Ward Roberts, and, for a time, Isobar Chicago, SpiderOak's design team mixed information security, aesthetics and design to develop new approaches of authenticating and communicating securely.
#69: Disappeared
Interviewed as part of an episode on the politics of the open source community for Gimlet Media's Reply All podcast
Take Back Your Privacy
Launch video for the secure collaboration project, Semaphor.
Semaphor.app
Core lead designer on an end-to-end encrypted collaboration platform. Tested a series of aesthetic and user experience concepts informed by ongoing user research and learnings from Kloak, an earlier project.
Nervous Design: Building Trust Into Interfaces
A talk showcasing design experiments that explore how user-hostile security and privacy can become the centre of a designer’s practice.
Encryptr.app
Redesign and rebrand of a light-weight open source synced password manager after its acqusition by SpiderOak.
Kloak.app
A white-list first microblogging social media app, highly private and designed with a novel form of inter-personal verification between users. Developed in collaboration with Carnegie Mellon University, specifically researching asynchronous key exchange.
Signal
Four month volunteer research project with Open Whisper Systems on for the popular encrypted messenger app, Signal. This prototype led to me contributing to the push to complete Signal 2.0 in Hawaii.
CoinJar.com
Creative Director at Australia's most successful cryptocurrency startup, overseeing design and product direction as the company transitioned from a small startup to a fully fledged new-finance platform. Oversaw the design and development of the company's suite of early-stage crypto products, including personal wallet apps for desktop and handheld devices and the CoinJar Swipe debit card.
Metaverse Nails
Design & branding for a cyberpunk Shanghai-based augmented reality fashion label.
Bitcoins.com
One of the first plain-language guides to bitcoin, completed at the beginning of the fledging cryptocurrency movement.