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It was during a short clown play in 2010 that Professor Lizzie Coles-Kemp realised she had things backwards.

The member of the Information Security Group (ISG) at Royal Holloway University of London was working with the  City Council and the voluntary sector in Sunderland. Together they were researching how marginalised and underserved groups access online essential services in a safe and secure way.

“It was an enlightening moment,” Lizzie - who is now head of department for the ISG - said while visiting ��ݮ��Ƶ at the end of March. 

“We realised the power imbalance had resulted in us taking the wrong research direction.   

“We had gone in with our questions and asked people to answer them, but they were often the wrong questions. [Rather than digital protections], this was about trust, identity, and the sharing of digital access within families. 

“It was about tensions between what work wanted from you in terms of digital protections, what the government wanted, and what [digital access] you wanted to negotiate within the family. None of that had been coming out in our traditional methods.”

Lizzie knew something had to change when the usual questions being asked during interviews were eliciting the usual responses. She turned to good friend Freya Stang, a professional healthcare clown and actor.

�ճ����� and took the play to Sunderland. This was part of a research project – titled VOME (Visualisation and Other Methods of Expression) - exploring how user communities engage with concepts of information privacy and consent in online interactions. 

“At the end of the performance, we had electronic voting paddles, and people could choose what information disclosure and protection outcomes were right for that story. 

“The clowns would then sit and have a conversation with the audience.

“We learned from the clowns that we had to rethink our modes of engagement. 

“We needed to co-design the focus of the engagement around forms of security that were important and create spaces where people could reflect and think.  

“Asking a series of questions [about digital security and privacy] one after another doesn't work because these are not conversations people have day-to-day. We needed to create space for reflection.”

Consequently Lizzie and her team developed different methods to help create these spaces for reflection – using Lego, collaborative collages, post-it notes, story sheets and more clown-led interactions – to better engage and understand what digital security issues were important to  marginalised and underserved groups.

Lizzie uses password sharing as an example. There is an assumption that you should never share passwords with other people. But she says there are many counterpoints to this that show we should design security technologies that take into account people’s digital realities that may well not be our own.

“If I'm sharing my bank account with a family member because I’m caring for them, or if I've spent time in prison and need someone to look after my money, keeping my password secret is not a high priority.  

“If I need to make a welfare claim, I might use public Wi-Fi because I can't afford data or Wi-Fi at home. 

“My risk perspective is shaped not only by my digital security concerns but also by other security issues including financial, physical, emotional and political concerns, and none of that was coming out in traditional methods.”

After working in Sunderland, Lizzie expanded to work with groups in Middlesborough, Durham and Newcastle in the north of England. 

 – families separated by prison weren’t using online support services provided to them. Lizzie wanted to know why. 

After early discussions, Lizzie chose to focus on the prison visiting journey rather than online support services because this was the context for using support services that resonated most with the family support groups that she met. 

“We worked with Freya and would go up every Friday, sitting in the prison waiting room, asking questions,” she said.

“It was a tense, stressful place, so people didn’t want to take part in a creative engagement. Instead, we wrote the contributions down on postcards and gradually built trust. Families started creating collages ... they realised the power of what we were creating and wanted a version of it to go into the prison.”

Lizzie worked with artist Alice Angus to screenprint the collages onto material, and the work ended up inside the prison. 

This collage was used for rehabilitation training for prisoners before their release, helping them understand the tensions in family faces.

In the years since, Lizzie has worked with various groups in Australia to train academics and practitioners. She has also worked with Iraqi and Syrian refugees in Sweden and Denmark, understanding how they engage with highly digital societies and the cultural differences this ensues.

She was at ��ݮ��Ƶ Sydney to talk about her work in fraud and scams. She has developed a different way of thinking about threat modeling, considering scenarios where a family member, government or telecom provider might be a threat actor. 

“Can we ever do research that fully empowers people? Or is there always a power imbalance? We must recognise our own privilege and how it shapes the topics we research. 

“It's important to think about inclusivity, accessibility, and equity, and recognise that our efforts will always be flawed. 

“But we need to keep trying because good things happen in that process.”