visible
In collaboration with Queen Mary University of London, this Speculative Futures project seeks to answer the HACKMASTERS brief asking
“What will trust look like in the future?”
In a future shaped by isolation, automation, and declining social participation, communities have become increasingly fragmented. Public trust still exists, but it is no longer visible.
People avoid interaction.
Neighbours remain strangers.
Society functions, but only at a distance.
As traditional forms of community disappear, governments begin searching for new ways to rebuild civic participation and social responsibility.
Visible imagines a future where trust becomes something publicly performed.
Inspired by jury service, the project proposes a system of mandatory community participation in which citizens are periodically selected to contribute to local communal work — caring for the elderly, supporting food banks, repairing public spaces, cooking, cleaning, and maintaining shared infrastructure.
The goal is not punishment.
It is participation.
As people work together, they exchange skills, build relationships, and reconnect with the communities around them. Trust is rebuilt through repeated acts of visible contribution.
To reinforce this new social culture, the project introduces a scent-based biometric system embedded into public architecture.
Doors detect whether an individual has completed their required civic participation and respond through coloured visual signals. Green indicates active contribution. Red indicates non-participation.
The system does not restrict access.
It simply makes trust visible.
Unlike facial recognition or digital identity systems, scent operates invisibly in the background — passively identifying individuals as they move through space. Public infrastructure quietly becomes a layer of social accountability woven into everyday life.
Visible explores a future where civic responsibility becomes socially embedded rather than privately assumed.
Yet beneath this optimistic vision lies a darker possibility.
When participation becomes measurable, contribution becomes performance.
Acts of kindness risk becoming transactional. Social behaviour becomes public data. Communities begin regulating themselves through subtle systems of visibility, judgement, and reward.
The project questions whether trust can truly exist once it is monitored.
Does visible accountability strengthen communities —
or simply create new forms of social pressure and exclusion?
Visible is both a proposal and a warning.
A future where society rebuilds itself through collective responsibility.
Or one where morality itself becomes infrastructure.
Meet the Team