Tactical Tech Studio designs and co-develops playful and forward-looking experiences, interventions, events, and self-learning resources that invite people to think about how technology influences their lives and changes the world they live in. The Tactical Tech Studio is affiliated with landmark projects from Tactical Tech such as The Glass Room, the Data Detox Kit, What the Future Wants, and the Digital Enquirer Kit that promote critical thinking about technology and its socio-political and environmental impacts. These resources are centered on collaborative methods, research, and iterative development.

The Tactical Tech Studio team has worked together to produce resources, build community, and support partnerships around the globe. Studio scales projects into impactful interventions by partnering with local organizations that use and adapt them to engage their communities. This article will spotlight the inspiring interventions from just a few of our partners. Check out their creative and unique adaptations, the tailored events and trainings they have organized and some of the ways they are championing media literacy in their communities. Most of the partnerships featured in this piece were possible thanks to generous funding and support from Sida.

Tactical Tech has had many partnerships over the years, each with their own unique interests and contexts. They often relate to broad categories:

• Hosting Partnerships: These partners organize exhibitions, events, workshops, and other creative interventions with readily available Tactical Tech resources, sometimes with necessary translations and local additions. These activities succeed because of the expertise of our partners in event programming, instruction, engagement methodologies, and community outreach.
• Contextualization Partnerships: These partners often focus on adapting Tactical Tech resources to become more relevant for local audiences, beyond direct translations, with more hands-on work through localization or creative adaptations of existing contents. These activities succeed because of the expertise of our partners in creative re-imaginings, transformative content development, and community engagement.
• Innovation Partnerships: These partners take adaptations to a new level by creating unique resources that have been inspired or informed by Tactical Tech resources, but that are so different from the source material that they may not seem related at first glance. These activities succeed because of the expertise of our partners in development, design, content creation, and subject-matter proficiency.

Let’s take a closer look at examples of each type of partnership, and celebrate the work of these partners together.

Tactical Tech’s intervention materials are modular and adaptable, which makes it possible for partners to use the resources in ways that they see best fit - experimentation is encouraged. Different formats have been designed to reduce barriers partners may face, for example, the cost and access to printers, space constraints, and experience in hosting interventions. Some partners choose to train facilitators and exhibition guides while others prefer it to be a self-learning experience.

Thydêwá, an Indigenist NGO working in the Brazilian Northeast, initiated an Indigenous study group, to review the resources on misinformation and create their own survey to measure the visitors knowledge about the topic before and after the exhibition. In addition, they felt it was helpful to have a facilitator available at the event to guide visitors, who weren’t used to visiting exhibitions by asking thought-provoking questions and contextualizing the content to their everyday.

Goethe-Institut hosted several exhibitions across Southeast Europe, as part of their “Fakeless” exhibition series. They included the What the Future Wants: Debut Edition materials.

A core part of the public engagement and intervention initiatives across the intersecting projects of The Glass Room, What the Future Wants, and the Data Detox Kit involves developing, testing, and implementing learning programs. While there are many types of learning programs, we tend to lean away from top-down teaching (which implies there is one expert imparting knowledge on students) and toward interactive workshops, trainings-of-trainers, peer-to-peer sessions and co-creative processes. Generally speaking, our primary objectives with learning programs is to engage audiences and encourage critical thinking, therefore more collaborative and interactive environments with space for discussions and reflections are the most effective ways we can reach those goals.

The Data Detox Kit’s workshop outlines have been tested and developed over time on topics relating to data privacy, digital safety, online wellbeing, and tackling misinformation. What the Future Wants’ workshop outlines, including co-creation sessions, have been tested internationally with young people of various ages and have contributed greatly to create digital and media literacy resources to foster more a better critical conversations on tech and society. One such example are the co-creation session workshops How Tech Shapes Our Future which encourages young people to explore, reflect on, and react to artificial intelligence (AI), gaming, or influence and What Matters to Us which invites young people to reflect their place in the community and the world, identifying the issues that matter to them.

Anyone is invited to use the workshops outlines to supplement wider learning programs, and encouraged to adapt the contents to the needs and interests of the participants. The workshop outlines include the lesson plan, learning objectives, as well as facilitator tips and variation ideas, in hopes of encouraging educators (including teachers, librarians, community leaders) to adjust the session to their exact specifications—whether that be online or offline, shorter or longer sessions, and different age groups and languages. The workshop outlines are intentionally designed to be conducted by facilitators who are not subject-matter experts and not necessarily confident about technology. The sessions are designed with non-formal and informal learning settings in mind, therefore people who are motivated to lead a session but who are not necessarily professional facilitators or career educators can also use the workshop outlines with ease. The workshop sub-sections and activities encourage self-reflection, ethical discussions, and cross-applicable skills such as critical thinking.

The co-creation workshops have been held by several organizations working with youth to collect inputs that informed the Everywhere, All the Time exhibition. Among other things, we’ve learned how technology has provided teenagers the opportunity to explore their interests, find community and learning experiences but also the concerns they have about tech eroding human-to-human relationships and impacting their mental health. We also learned about how keen they are to understand how different technologies actually work and the different ways they impact society. A partner that has contributed to this process has been Yusuf Ganyana, a librarian based in Kenya. During the development phase of Everywhere, All the Time, besides conducting the co-creation workshop What Matters to Us, Yusuf ran a series of testing workshop to assess language and design of draft version of what would become Everywhere, All the Time exhibition. The testing workshops and feedback from Yusuf gave the Tactical Tech team valuable insights that propelled them to adjust the framing and word choices before the launch of the exhibition in 2024. Throughout the years, Yusuf has also tested and adapted several Data Detox Kit and WTFW workshops providing detailed feedback from its implementation while at the same running a re-purposing program to provide digital devices to young people from underprivileged socio-economic backgrounds. He has also developed and conducted workshops through Digital You, an initiative between Goethe-Instituts across Sub-Saharan Africa and Tactical Tech.

When paired with greater digital and media literacy interventions, such as exhibition materials, the workshops emerge as a central meeting place to dive deeper into the topics proposed in the posters. Workshops are meant to be open-yet-guided places of exploration, discussion, and sharing, oftentimes with no single right answer. Workshops can be used for processing complex information, capacity-building, and collaboration. In this sense several partners with ongoing digital and media literacy programs and interventions in their communities have relied on The Glass Room, Data Detox Kit and What the Future Wants resources to further expand their work and outreach. One example is Ubunteam, an NGO working to promote open source software and digital inclusion in Ivory Coast. They’ve translated several Tactical Tech resources and have implemented several training programs and workshops as part of their strategy to build a community of citizens knowledgeable on topics concerning digital privacy and security that can further support conversations in the country around these topics. Ubunteam have also conducted workshops through Digital You.

Partners like the International Young Catholic Students (IYCS) through their Africa office have implemented a multi-country peer-to-peer program for teens to train them to host and run digital and media literacy activities with their peers. Taking stock of their structure of IYCS-Africa country and local school groups, in 2023 the organization hosted an initial training for young multipliers from three countries (Rwanda, Zimbabwe and Zambia) and then support them to host creative interventions and conduct trainings for their peers. A similar approach has been taken by Policy Lab in Nigeria. They have conducted several workshops based of The Glass Room and What the Future Wants in different university campus as side events to hosting exhibitions to build capacity of young people to be multipliers for digital literacy in their communities and among their peers.

In order to reach the widest impact with workshops, Tactical Tech offers training-of-trainers (ToT) in order to train educators on an agreed upon program of sessions to also build their capacity to continue scaling these initiatives further, wider, and in more languages and contexts. ToTs have been given to partners as well as to select staff and affiliates of globally recognized organizations, such as Goethe-Institut, Save the Children, and the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA).

Cauce Ciudadano, a Mexican organization working to build a more resilient a sustainable community in the periphery of Mexico City, expanded the What the Future Wants: Debut Edition. Since the organization already runs a Fab Lab, they designed a training program ahead of the exhibition and challenged the group of young participants to produce their own art objects based on their understanding of the impact of tech in their community. The training consisted in a six workshops mixing digital fabrication labs and workshops inspired on WTFW content where each participant had to produce an art piece to feature in the exhibition. Participants created 13 new pieces and Cauce Ciudadano hosted an open exhibition to the community where What the Future Wants: Debut Edition was hosted alongside the art pieces developed by young people resulting in a complete new framing of the content.

Partners from around the world have generously shared their methodologies as well, in order to promote professional development and capacity building across the partnership and with other educators. A remarkable example is Casa Hacker, a Brazilian NGO based in São Paulo. Through their partnership with Tactical Tech, they’ve build a model of in-person and online training-of-trainers program to build the capacity of educators (including teachers, youth workers, cultural animators) to host and run digital literacy events for teens based on What the Future Wants resources. The program includes inviting educators to reflect upon their own relationship with technology and their understanding of how tech impacts society as well as providing strategies and methods to engage youth critically in conversations concerning their digital lives. To learn more about their trainings program, please check out their GitHub page that includes the architecture of their trainings with concrete tips.

Translation is often one of the first steps we take in our partnerships to make our resources accessible to more people. Our resources exist in so many languages thanks to partners, our network of translators and volunteers. On The Glass Room and What the Future Wants translation page, the team has outlined what translations exist from their materials; there are even more languages available for the Data Detox Kit. In addition to one-to-one translation, some resources are further localized. Localization is the process of adapting materials to specific linguistic, cultural, demographic, or regional contexts. Sometimes the extra step of localizing makes all the difference for resources to feel more relevant to audiences.

Our partners have also adapted content - ranging from transforming, remixing, to redesigning to complete put the content in a new format or communication channel.

Tactical Tech resources are designed to discuss cross-cutting topics on tech and society in a way that can resonate with various audiences no matter who they are or where they are. Nevertheless, the relevance and angle of the topics and the way they intersect can widely differ. Thus, Tactical Tech often welcomes partners to remix and transform the contents into formats that can better serve the needs of their communities. Adaptations usually derive from partnerships where the local partner is able to leverage their expertise and skills to transform the resources in a way that better supports the mission they are seeking to accomplish with their audience. The act of contextualizing materials usually involve some level of new design, a reframing of the topics through expansion or reduction of certain elements, and remixing of different content into a new resource. Conversely, adaptations expands Tactical Tech own understanding of the way different communities experience different topics - observations that inform future resources.

The Glass Room’s poster A Data Day looks at the kinds of terms and conditions one might accept as they scroll through their phone. The original 'A Data-Day in London' was created for the Glass Room. It was updated in May 2018 for a more international audience prior to the General Data Protection Regulation's enforcement date, and again in January 2021.

In 2021, a partner in Indonesia called the House of Natural Fiber surveyed people in the local community on their most-used apps, researched the terms and conditions of popular apps, and translated and contextualized the poster for their audiences in Yogyakarta. Although it had the same visual design as the original, the contents were completely bespoke to the local audiences.

Tactical Tech later reformatted the original poster as a video animation, a great medium to present information in an engaging and condensed way. Animations are also great for young people and can be shown in classrooms. The Glass Room has produced various video animations based on posters.

Other partners used the same template to create a blank poster to be used in workshops about the terms and conditions in popular Swedish apps, as is seen in the image below. A group of Swedish libraries worked together to test this workshop out and reported high engagement by the visitors.