VOICE (Visual Outputs for Inclusive Change and Environments) is a nonprofit research organization that maps social justice movements by translating user-generated protest content into architectural diagrams and spatial evidence. Its digital mapping platform and video evidence tool, CODEC, connect events like the Women Life Freedom movement in Tehran and war crimes in Bucha to site-specific contexts, aiding lawyers, artists, and activists in fact-finding and analysis.
Funding
Funding not disclosed
Founders
Product
Problem
News outlets often provide imprecise or incomplete coverage of protest events, failing to document the specific locations, flows, and spatial experiences of those involved. This lack of detail hampers legal fact-finding, activist analysis, and public understanding of human rights violations and social justice movements in the built environment.
Solution
VOICE conducts multidisciplinary research that leverages user-generated digital content—such as videos, images, and social media posts—to create architectural diagrams and spatial mappings of protest events. By analyzing firsthand accounts and documenting site-specific contexts, VOICE transforms raw media into visual evidence that reveals how the built environment shapes and reflects social justice struggles. The research aims to determine whether a spatial approach to documenting and visualizing events can benefit lawyers, artists, and social activists in their investigations. Through its CODEC video evidence and organizational tool, VOICE connects events like the Women Life Freedom movement in Tehran and war crimes in Bucha, Ukraine, to their physical surroundings, offering a deeper critique of how Western journalists document foreign events.
Target Audience
Primary users are lawyers, artists, social activists, and researchers who need spatial, visual documentation and analysis of protest events and human rights violations to support fact-finding, advocacy, and legal efforts.
Features
- CODEC video evidence and organizational platform for event timelines, assisting research in linking protest movements to site context and surroundings
- Architectural diagramming of user-generated content to document events, including spatial flows, such as how students fled paintball attacks during protests
- Focus on underrepresented narratives, including refugees, survivors of oppression, and gender apartheid, with emphasis on the Women Life Freedom movement and Bucha war crimes
- Digital mapping designed to visualize protestor experiences and built-environment interactions for social justice research
- Integration of firsthand activist and protestor media to represent evidence through multiple analytical focuses