Design Microprotests

This essay considers three design projects as microprotests. Reflecting on the ways design practice can generate spaces, sites and methods of protest, we use the concept of microprotest to consider how we, as designers ourselves, can protest by scaling down, focussing, slowing down and paying attention to the edges of our practice. Design microprotest is a form of design activism that is always collaborative, takes place within a community, and involves careful translation of a political conversation. While microprotest can manifest in any design discipline, in this essay we focus on visual communication design. In particular we consider the deep, reflexive practice of listening as the foundation of microprotests in visual communication design. While small in scale and fleeting in duration, these projects express rich and deep political engagements through conversations that create and maintain safe spaces. While many design theorists (Julier; Fuad-Luke; Clarke; Irwin et al.) have done important work to contextualise activist design as a broad movement with overlapping branches (social design, community design, eco-design, participatory design, critical design, and transition design etc.), the scope of our study takes ‘micro’ as a starting point. We focus on the kind of activism that takes shape in moments of careful design; these are moments when designers move politically, rather than necessarily within political movements. These microprotests respond to community needs through design more than they articulate a broad activist design movement. As such, the impacts of these microprotests often go unnoticed outside of the communities within which they take place. We propose, and test in this essay, a mode of analysis for design microprotests that takes design activism as a starting point but pays more attention to community and translation than designers and their global reach. In his analysis of design activism, Julier proposes “four possible conceptual tactics for the activist designer that are also to be found in particular qualities in the mainstream design culture and economy” (Julier, Introduction 149). We use two of these tactics to begin exploring a selection of attributes common to design microprotests: temporality – which describes the way that speed, slowness, progress and incompletion are dealt with; and territorialisation – which describes the scale at which responsibility and impact is conceived (227). In each of three projects to which we apply these tactics, one of us had a role as a visual communicator. As such, the research is framed by the knowledge creating paradigm described by Jonas as “research through design”. We also draw on other conceptualisations of design activism, and the rich design literature that has emerged in recent times to challenge the colonial legacies of design studies (Schultz; Tristan et al.; Escobar). Some analyses of design activism already focus on the micro or the minor. For example, in their design of social change within organisations as an experimental and iterative process, Lensjkold, Olander and Hasse refer to Deleuze and Guattari’s minoritarian: “minor design activism is ‘a position in co-design engagements that strives to continuously maintain experimentation” (67). Like minor activism, design microprotests are linked to the continuous mobilisation of actors and networks in processes of collective experimentation. However microprotests do not necessarily focus on organisational change. Rather, they create new (and often tiny) spaces of protest within which new voices can be heard and different kinds of listening can be done. In the first of our three cases, we discuss a representation of transdisciplinary listening. This piece of visual communication is a design microprotest in itself. This section helps to frame what we mean by a safe space by paying attention to the listening mode of communication. In the next sections we explore temporality and territorialisation through the design microprotests Just Spaces which documents the collective imagining of safe places for LBPQ (Lesbian, Bisexual, Pansexual, and Queer) women and non-binary identities through a series of graphic objects and Conversation Piece, a book written, designed and published over three days as a proposition for a collective future

Hard Exclusive Pion Electroproduction at Backward Angles With CLAS

We report on the first measurement of cross sections for exclusive deeply virtual pion electroproduction off the proton, ep → e\u27nπ+, above the resonance region at backward pion center-of-mass angles. The ϕ∗ π-dependent cross sections were measured, from which we extracted three combinations of structure functions of the proton. Our results are compatible with calculations based on nucleon-to-pion transition distribution amplitudes (TDAs). These non-perturbative objects are defined as matrix elements of threequark-light-cone-operators and characterize partonic correlations with a particular emphasis on baryon charge distribution inside a nucleon

Measurement of the Generalized Form Factors Near Threshold Via ˠ*p→nπ+ at High Q²

We report on the first measurement of the F2 structure function of the neutron from the semi-inclusive scattering of electrons from deuterium, with low-momentum protons detected in the backward hemisphere. Restricting the momentum of the spectator protons to ≲ 100  MeV/c and their angles to ≳ 100° relative to the momentum transfer allows an interpretation of the process in terms of scattering from nearly on-shell neutrons. The Fn2 data collected cover the nucleon-resonance and deep-inelastic regions over a wide range of Bjorken x for 0.65 \u3c Q2 2, with uncertainties from nuclear corrections estimated to be less than a few percent. These measurements provide the first determination of the neutron to proton structure function ratio Fn2 / Fp2 at 0.2 ≲ x ≲0.8 with little uncertainty due to nuclear effects

First Results on Nucleon Resonance Photocouplings from the γp → π+π−p Reaction

We report the first experimental measurements of the nine 1-fold differential cross sections for the γ p → π+π−p reaction, obtained with the CLAS detector at Jefferson Laboratory. The measurements cover the invariant mass range of the final state hadrons from 1.6 GeV \u3c W \u3c 2.0 GeV. For the first time the photocouplings of all prominent nucleon resonances in this mass range have been extracted from this exclusive channel. Photoproduction of two charged pions is of particular importance for the evaluation of the photocouplings for the Δ (1620)1/2−, Δ (1700)3/2−, N(1720)3/2+, and Δ (1905)5/2+ resonances, which have dominant decays into the π π N final states rather than the more extensively studied single meson decay channels

Pion-nucleus optical potential valid up to the DELTA-resonance region

We present in this article an optical potential for the $\pi$-nucleus interaction that can be used in various studies involving $\pi$-nucleus channels. Based on earlier treatments of the low energy $\pi$-nucleus optical potential, we have derived a potential expression applicable from threshold up to the $\Delta$-resonance region. We extracted the impulse approximation form for this potential from the $\pi-N$ scattering amplitude and then added to it kinematical and physical corrections. The kinematic corrections arise from transforming the impulse approximation expression from the $\pi-N$ center of mass frame to the $\pi$-nucleus center of mass frame, while the physical corrections arise mostly from the many-body nature of the $\pi$-nucleus interaction. By taking advantage of the experimental progress in our knowledge of the $\pi-N$ process, we have updated earlier treatments with parameters calculated from state-of-the-art experimental measurements.Comment: 23 pages, 12 figures. Accepted for publication in Physical Review

Evidence for the N′(1720)3/2+N'(1720)3/2^+ Nucleon Resonance from Combined Studies of CLAS π+π−p\pi^+\pi^-p Photo- and Electroproduction Data

The analysis of the nine 1-fold differential cross sections for the $\gamma_{r,v} p \to \pi^+\pi^-p$ photo- and electroproduction reactions obtained with the CLAS detector at Jefferson Laboratory was carried out with the goal to establish the contributing resonances in the mass range from 1.6~GeV to 1.8~GeV. In order to describe the photo- and electroproduction data with $Q^2$-independent resonance masses and hadronic decay widths in the $Q^2$ range below 1.5~GeV$^2$, it was found that an $N'(1720)3/2^+$ state is required in addition to the already well-established nucleon resonances. This work demonstrates that the combined studies of $\pi^+\pi^-p$ photo- and electroproduction data are vital for the observation of this resonance. The contributions from the $N'(1720)3/2^+$ state and the already established $N(1720)3/2^+$ state with a mass of 1.745~GeV are well separated by their different hadronic decays to the $\pi \Delta$ and $\rho p$ final states and the different $Q^2$-evolution of their photo-/electroexcitation amplitudes. The $N'(1720)3/2^+$ state is the first recently established baryon resonance for which the results on the $Q^2$-evolution of the photo-/electrocouplings have become available. These results are important for the exploration of the nature of the ``missing'' baryon resonances.Comment: accepted for publication in Phys. Lett.