From left, John Kelly of Interactive Design Lab; Peter Gabriel, singer-songwriter and founder of WITNESS; Bruce Ferguson, Dean of the School of the Arts, and Andrew Lih of Interactive Design Lab.

In December, John Kelly and Andrew Lih of Columbia's Interactive Design Lab joined singer-songwriter Peter Gabriel and leading experts on technology, entertainment and human rights for a roundtable discussion entitled "How Video and Communications Technologies Can Create Social Change and Advance Human Rights." The event took place downtown at the headquarters of Arc eConsultancy, an Internet consulting firm.

Gabriel introduced the evening, explaining the simple idea behind WITNESS, an organization he co-founded in 1992 together with the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights: "If you can get a camera to the right place at the right time, that can make all the difference." He added, "Rodney King is an example of a little bit of video footage going a long way."

It was the King incident, recorded on grainy, low-resolution video that galvanized Gabriel and inspired him to start the non-profit. WITNESS has now partnered with 130 groups in 147 countries to provide video cameras and training to local citizens in their efforts to monitor and prevent human rights abuses. WITNESS partner-produced videos have been used to corroborate allegations of human rights violations; to produce reports for the United Nations as well as documentaries for public broadcast; to conduct grassroots education and mobilization, as a resource for the news media and as evidence in legal proceedings. The organization has had a direct positive impact on the lives of sweatshop workers in New York City, human rights activists in Ghana and Haitian immigrants in the Dominican Republic, among others.

Columbia's Interactive Design Lab (IDL) began a collaboration with WITNESS one year ago, just as WITNESS began to develop its new Web site. Kelly and Lih, the two principal investigators who direct the lab, said that they became involved because of their respect for the human rights organization's mission, and a sense that the IDL had something to contribute. Kelly said, "WITNESS has clear needs: capturing and transmitting information in several media formats, and delivering to various audiences compelling evidence of human rights violations around the world. These provide a focus for designing useful applications of new technologies. We hope that if IDL can come up with solutions that work for WITNESS, they will form the basis of new methodologies appropriate across a wide range of media platforms."

At the roundtable discussion, Kelly outlined ways the Internet can provide more direct communication between activists on the field and supporters in secure locations. He also projected into the future the possibilities of low earth orbit satellites in transmitting still and motion pictures. Both methods could eliminate the physical requirement that an activist/witness smuggle videotape out of a dangerous situation as well as significantly speed the process of distributing the material and raising awareness. Other participants in the discussion were journalists, activists, and members of Arc: eConsultancy and Oddcast, a provider of media and entertainment technology solutions.

The IDL, a collaboration between Columbia's School of the Arts and the Graduate School of Journalism, was launched a year ago.

Lih said, "At IDL, our job is to bring an understanding of good design principles and practices to the development of new media content. Working with WITNESS provides us an opportunity to address, in microcosm, many of the key design challenges on the horizon of emergent media. This and other projects now underway at IDL have the prospect of extending these principles and practices to many kinds of organizations, primarily providers of non-fiction content related to journalism and the arts."