lora & leo

Global civil rights are under pressure. In 2024, internet shutdowns reached a record high of 296 documented cases, cutting off millions of people from communication, information, and each other. Meanwhile, surveillance infrastructure — from predictive policing platforms to border control systems that scan social media — is expanding rapidly, including in Europe. This project takes these political realities and former products of resistance as its design brief. This thesis is inspired by a century of resistance objects, from crystal radios used to organize against Nazi occupation to USB drives smuggled across the North Korean border, the project proposes that making communication possible has historically been one of the most powerful tools against oppression. this thesis argues, that (industrial) design carries political responsibility. The project is called Lora & Leo: two complementary devices (nodes) that form a decentralised, end-to-end encrypted mesh network. The Lora card is a credit-card-sized low-power messenger that enables local peer-to-peer messaging without any other infrastructure needed. The Leo node provides satellite backhaul for global connectivity to widen bandwidth and make low latency internet and data up- and download possible. together they operate without central servers. kept running by the community that uses them. Because the network is distributed across many independent nodes, constantly moving and expanding, there is no single point of failure and no single actor who can shut it down.