🔒
How to protect window sex workers from AI-based image recognition while preserving their visibility?
Exploring how design can safeguard identity and autonomy.
✨
What design strategies can ensure privacy and autonomy for sex workers in a constantly surveilled city?
The project began with a simple but powerful question that arose from conversations with sex workers in Amsterdam’s Red Light District, De Wallen. Observations of the glowing windows highlighted how technology has changed the meaning of visibility.
👁️ The same glass that invites customers also exposes the workers behind it to constant digital surveillance, including phones, cameras and facial recognition systems. This environment serves as both a workplace and a stage, providing visibility while creating vulnerability.
🔍
Observing the Environment
Research was conducted in the area to observe how the physical environment shapes interactions.
📸 Instances of tourists taking photos without consent were noted, highlighting that while technology can provide empowerment it can also result in violations. This observation served as the starting point for the project.
🛠️
Findings
While photography and filming are officially prohibited, digital surveillance and AI-based image recognition continue to expose workers to risks beyond their control.
⚠️ This highlights the urgent need for a design response that balances safety and autonomy. From these insights, visibility was reframed as a matter of choice rather than exposure.
🛡️
Design Concept and Prototype: Protecting Privacy
The process evolved through three main steps: scenario, concept and prototype. A textile-based protection system was proposed to defend digital privacy without limiting real-world presence. By integrating infrared light into a knitted fabric, a surface was created that remains visually open to the human eye but blocks cameras, giving workers control over how they are seen both physically and digitally.
🔒 The concept evolved into a modular, self-assembled privacy panel (135 × 180 cm) constructed from reclaimed pine wood, knitted technical textiles and a 940 nm IR subsystem. Its flat-pack construction allows easy transport, assembly and recycling, while the infrared emission generates a protective light field invisible to the human eye.
💡 The result is a luminous boundary, not a wall of separation, but a design tool that empowers bodily autonomy and redefines what it means to be visible.
Credits:
Matilde Finco / Gege Liang / Yunjia Guo / Aurora Amici / Eleonora Pertot / Rachele Polisano / Rui Kong
The project was realized as part of the Fashion Craft course within the Master’s Degree in Design for the Fashion System at Polimi.
