Team and Collaborators

Cade Diehm

Founder

Cade is the founder of the New Design Congress, an international research organisation forging a nuanced understanding of technology's role as a social, political and environmental accelerant. With a multi-disciplinary background in information security, interface politics and digital systems, Cade and his team study digital infrastructure to understand how technology at scale influences the perspectives and safety of policy-makers, activists and researchers. Through this work, Cade has led consultations with PEN International, UCL London, Google, Mozilla, the European Centre for Constitutional and Human Rights, the International Institute for the Environment and Development, the European Commission, Protocol Labs, the Deutschland Bundestag Prototype Fund, the Center for Digital Resilience, the Algorithmic Transparency Institute and many others.

Prior to founding the New Design Congress, Cade spent ten years leading design-focused digital security projects in Australia, the United States, Korea, Germany, Singapore and the United Kingdom. He was an information security researcher and head of production at the Berlin-based non-profit Tactical Tech, providing security consultation and bringing the NGO’s activism to audiences worldwide. He contributed to early prototypes of the secure messaging app Signal and was Chief Design Officer at SpiderOak, then a Snowden approved no-knowledge cloud storage company.

Cade holds national and Paralympic world records, having represented Australia in international disability swimming between 1999 and 2006.

Ellis Jones

Infrastructure Research

Ellis Jones is a interdisciplinary systems designer, community organiser, researcher and event organiser based in Lausanne, Switzerland. With the New Design Congress they have worked on apps, backend systems, websites, livestreams and research into the Para-Real, an emergent theory of online subcultures developing patterns for economic solidarity.

They are the founder and core-organiser of ReclaimFutures, a grassroots technology and culture conference about post-capitalist desire. Ellis is also a founding coorganiser of Loose Antenna, a community run and oriented web-radio, launched in June 2020, where they host a monthly music show.

Benjamin Royer

Research Lead

Benjamin is a researcher at the New Design Congress, an international research organisation forging a nuanced understanding of technology's role as a social, political and environmental accelerant. Focusing on the political dimension of human-computer interactions, Benjamin combines insider knowledge on the tech, design and consulting industries with a sharp critical framework borrowing from philosophy, anthropology and sociology. His work has taken the form of collaborations with Ink & Switch, PEN International, Mozilla, Webrecorder, Protocol Labs and Junkipedia. Benjamin has translated Adam Greenfield's book Radical Technologies, The Design of Everyday Life in French on behalf of Verso Books and Presence(s) Editions for publication in mid-2022.

Before joining the New Design Congress, Benjamin had ten unfortunate years of experience in the field of human-machine interactions, information architecture, user-experience and user-interface for such benefactors of the world as BCG, McKinsey or the British governement.

Rose Regina Lawrence

Security Research, Friend of NDC

Rose Regina Lawrence is an independent security researcher. Since 2011, she has focused on issues of surveillance and digital security for activists, journalists, lawyers, and other human rights defenders. She developed and ran the Jail Support coordination hotline for Occupy Wall Street. Her experience includes supporting both independent human rights advocates and organisations, such as Mozilla, Software Freedom Law Center, and most recently, Tactical Tech, as their Digital Security Coordinator.

Georgia Bullen

Executive Director, Superbloom

Georgia has been an advocate in the internet health movement through her work and passion around issues such as net neutrality, security, privacy, and equitable access to technology. Her work has focused on the intersection of human-centred design, urban space, and technology – specifically, how technology intersects with human rights, e.g access to information and the right to communicate. She has a background in human-centred design, data visualisation, urban planning and software development, and is an advocate for diversity in technology. She studied Urban Planning at Columbia University's Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, and Psychology and Human-Computer Interaction at Carnegie Mellon.