As states increasingly turn to mobile technology to incentivise and administer voluntary migration return programs, a new kind of UX has emerged – one that must simultaneously function as a bureaucratic instrument, a marketing campaign, and a persuasion machine. These apps promise dignity and choice while encoding urgency, surveillance, and consequence into every interaction.
This three-hour workshop examines government-issued self-deportation applications as objects of design critique and sociotechnical conditions that emerge from their advertising rigor. Drawing on methods from speculative design and, as Maisa calls it, conceptual web development, participants will conduct a close reading of the aesthetic and rhetorical strategies embedded in voluntary return interfaces: their color palettes, onboarding flows, copywriting, iconography, and the emotional labor they perform on users navigating fear, uncertainty, and loss. How do these apps construct the "user"? What fantasies of safety and belonging do they sell? And what remains invisible in the interface – the legal fine print, the data trails, the years of exclusion that follow a single tap? In response to the intellectual stimulation, participants will develop counter-proposals: alternative UX flows, speculative ad campaigns, or critical mockups that expose, subvert, or reimagine what a "voluntary" return might look and feel like if designed with radical transparency, care, or dissent.
No design or technical experience is required. The workshop is open to artists, researchers, designers, activists, and anyone who feels like urgency and paralysis feel like the same thing right now.
On March 19, join us for a book presentation followed by a conversation with Maisa Imamović about her latest book, Maisa in Webland: Detouring UX Destinies, published by Set Margins (2025).
Maisa Imamović is a writer, web designer/developer, and experimental educator based in Los Angeles and, oftentimes, in Amsterdam. She critically studies the role of the single user and user behaviors generated by code. She codes to challenge the ideology of user-friendliness, support cultural platforms, respond to political gems, and socialize. Text Code are her main mediums. In 2022, her first book The Psychology of the Web Developer, Reality of a Female Freelancer was published by the Institute of Network Cultures. In the academic year of 2024-2025, she taught creative coding and the history of cyberfeminism as an adjunct professor at USC Media Arts Practice, UCLA Design Media Arts, ArtCenter Interaction Design, CalArts Critical Studies and Integrated Media. She holds an MA degree in Aesthetics & Politics from the California Institute of the Arts. In 2025, her second book entitled Maisa in Webland: Detouring UX Destinies was published by Set Margins. Currently, she is pursuing a Ph.D. in Media Arts Practice at the University of Southern California.