Meet the designer who makes high-tech nail art and fights facial recognition with flowers

Technology designer Joselyn McDonald creates bus passes, thumb drives, and green screens on her fingernails. She also strategically applies makeup to combat facial recognition software.

Based in North Carolina, McDonald is the co-founder of Blink Blink Creative Circuit Kits, which makes gender inclusive STEM education products, and previously served as creative technologist in residence at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Media Lab.

An anti-facial recognition makeup look by McDonald.

Credit: Joselyn McDonald

Nail art by McDonald featuring digital screens.

Credit: Joselyn McDonald

Mashable talked to McDonald about her 3D-printed nails, anti-facial recognition workshops, and hopes for the future of the tech industry.

Mashable: How did you come to focus on beauty and women’s interests in your tech innovation work?

Joselyn McDonald: I think my origin story is that I’ve always been really interested in technical work. But for a variety of reasons, like growing up in a semi-rural part of North Carolina and the resources that my community had, I feel like a lot of the attempts that I made to try and enter into tech spaces, I felt really othered or shy about it even. I think the barriers for women in tech can be really confrontational. You’re not in the space, and you’re getting made fun of, and it’s just not a welcoming or inclusive space.

So later, when I found my way back to tech, I just felt so drawn to try and examine gender and technology. And when you think about the kinds of projects that you get introduced to in the tech space, there’s sort of a thematic category, like robot projects, or certain kinds of coding projects, building a game, or building a physics simulator. And there’s nothing against that, and that works for a lot of people as sort of introductory exercises in the tech space.

But I’ve just been interested in like, exploding that out and thinking about a whole wide variety of entry points for people into tech that’s more about an identity that they’re interested in. And for me, I’m really interested in beauty and art, and boundary pushing, and women’s health, and I’m really interested in humor. Those are the kinds of spaces within tech design that hook my attention. But there’s so many different kinds of starting points for people, so a lot of my work is really about me positioning what I’m interested in, and then the entry points for other people as well.

Talk to me about you Mother Protect Me anti-facial recognition series. Where did that idea come from?

I was in grad school at Carnegie Mellon, and I was focusing on human computer interaction. And I remember there being a day where everyone was like, abuzz because this thing on Reddit had taken off where some developers in facial recognition were positioning that their software tool could be used to identify whether their girlfriends had ever been in pornography. And obviously, that’s a really complicated thing that I feel inherently, completely against. I’m completely in support of sex work. But I’m against people developing a tool and using it to find dirt on women, and out them or embarrass them, or have some sort of control over them.

And then similarly, there was a Russian app that came out called FindFace. They also marketed their app as being like, you could go out to a coffee shop and you see a beautiful woman, then you can take a picture of her and it shows you all of her social media information. So those two events, they both completely left out women’s perspectives and they just reinforce all the worst social dynamics, like misogyny, and stalking, and terrible power dynamics. So that’s where facial recognition started to really get in my mind as being a kind of technology that’s like a Pandora’s box, that I think could be used in so many ways to harm women.

So how did you go from like, “Wow, facial recognition sucks,” to “I’m gonna fight it with makeup application?”

What I thought would be a useful approach was to learn a whole lot about facial recognition, because I don’t develop facial recognition in any of my research, but I want to understand essentially how this works. And then I would like to be able to communicate that to people.

There’s this piece called CV Dazzle which used punk makeup to undermine an older version of facial detection, [but] that was just not my kind of style. But when I got reoriented to caring about this issue in a big way, I wanted to make my own aesthetic approach to undermining it.

Credit: Joselyn McDonald

Credit: Joselyn McDonald

Why flowers?

Basically, when you add information that the algorithm isn’t expecting, it’s really helpful. So by adding flowers, that’s like an additional layer where the algorithm gets super confused about what it’s looking at.

And as an artist, as a designer, I’m really interested in thematic approaches to problems. So one of the things that I’ve been thinking a lot about is as humanity, our run towards technology, especially over the last few decades, was sort of this abandonment of our concern of the natural world. And so I thought that there was some interesting themes to leverage in terms of applying natural elements to my face to undermine what I think is one of the worst technologies that we could develop.

What does being in one of your workshops typically look like?

I hold a ton of workshops where I explain at a pretty high level how the tech works, why it has problems, what it’s looking for. And then I hold a workshop with people to make their own looks that are representative of their own identity. And they can use the flora like I do, but they also could use whatever sort of things that they have around the house, or things that they’re really interested in exploring. And I’ve seen so many really interesting makeup looks that people have put together.

How do you want Mother Protect Me to affect facial recognition tech?

What I think will help humanity is regulation, and public conversation about our civil liberties and what we want our relationship between public and private information to be. But what I can do, as someone that’s just really interested in this space and in education, is I can try and break this down into digestible bits and then explain that back to people.

It’s kind of a meditative practice, of iteratively building your anti-facial recognition look and testing it in real time to see if it’s working. It seems to bring people into the conversation in not a super threatening way. My hope is to bring a positive sort of agency for people into the space, but this is not the scalable solution, to put these masks on every day.

Let’s also talk about your Digits project. Where did the inspiration for that come from?

I have always thought acrylic nails, especially, are so fascinating and so beautiful. And also partially because I’ve always been tech oriented, and a maker person and a tinkerer, I can’t really have long nails for a lot of my work. So I’ve just been super envious my whole life of people that have long nails. But I also love that they’re these sort of windows into people’s identity, and a way for people to express themselves.

One of McDonald’s nail and tech innovations.
Credit: Joselyn McDonald

Why combine acrylic nails and technology? What made you take the jump from just admiring the beauty aspect of nail art to using it?

I have been thinking for a long time about how certain areas of practice, if they are associated with women, can be seen as not technical work. Like, completely not falling within a technical category.

So I started to think about how nail art and the creation of nails is actually a really technical space. Think about the tools that are used to do it, the control that you have to have, the chemical science that is required to cure properly. And we see nail artists really pushing the boundaries of chemical science work in order to create really sculptural, fascinating, boundary pushing art.

And I’ve been thinking about how it falls into this category of very technical, but because it’s associated with beauty and women, not categorized or theorized from that technical lens. So I just wanted to explore that space myself as someone who’s directly a tech designer. I want to directly apply tech design processes to how I explore that space.

What’s the process like for creating your nail looks?

So what I’ve done is more of like a breadth approach. I’ve done 3D printed nails. I’ve done a plastic curing process around nails. I’ve created 3D printer molds where I can put in material to cure. And then I’ve also explored digital nails, so using little screens that I can program that communicate information on the nails as well.

My caveat is that I fully acknowledge that people who are nail artists professionally are so, so, so, much more technically proficient than I am. There’s no way I can even get close to what they’re able to do. But what I’m interested in doing is applying these technologies I’m familiar with, and then trying to intersect them with nail art as a way to trigger more about that conversation, and then also see if that’s an interesting entry point into tech design for more kinds of people.

Do you have a favorite nail look that you’ve created?

My favorite nails I’ve made are actually the RFID bus pass nails. They aren’t the most beautiful nails I’ve made, but the interaction of using my nail to pay for my bus fare was truly a delightful and thrilling experience.

What kind of real-world application are you hoping your projects may inspire?

With the Mother Protect Me work, through my communication about [facial recognition], I want people to feel like they can understand how the tech works. I want them to feel like they are having a conversation with themselves, and hopefully other people, about how increasing surveillance impacts them and whether they want to continue on this road towards more surveillance apparatuses that can actually impact your behavior and your relationship to the world. I’m hoping that we just get more people feeling like they can understand and access it so that they can, hopefully, talk to their representatives about it.

And for Digits?

In terms of Digits, that’s just been a really personal exploration of creativity. But I do think ideally, that work that I’m doing in that space, would trigger in the minds of some viewers an interest in exploring technology. For people who feel like tech isn’t for them, maybe they don’t have the background in it or they feel othered in that space, [I hope that] because of the beauty angle and the personal expression piece of it, they become interested and they want to participate and play around.

What do you hope to see change in the tech community?

Ultimately, that’s all towards just wanting tech to be a more open space. Tech has become so narrow in terms of who feels like they can participate in it, and that leads to so fewer voices in the rooms making decisions. We need more people feeling like they understand tech so they don’t feel threatened by it. And then I think that moves the needle forward in terms of more diverse people being in those rooms, making those kinds of decisions and feeling equipped to understand what’s happening or to potentially solve an issue in their community.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.