Visuals for Emancipatory Technology: A Case Study in Co-Designing a Visual Language to Counter Online Gender-Based Violence on Indian Twitter

Abstract

This essay is an account of the visual design for Uli, a user-facing browser plugin to detect and moderate online gender-based violence on Twitter. The authors of this essay, who were involved as visual designers in the team that developed Uli, discuss the co-design process behind creating the visual narrative of such a tool to represent the collective labour in its creation by journalists, activists, community influencers, writers, technologists, and researchers engaged in the struggle against the interwoven caste, religion, gender and sexuality-based violence both online and offline. The essay finally sheds light on how such a visual identity and narrative can promote an alternate visual culture that challenges the dominant visual language of social media that's complacent in the propagation of online gender-based violence.

Keywords

• visual design
• Twitter plugin
• online gender-based violence
• feminist technology
• interdisciplinary design