TRACE

Robodebt raised 470,000+ unlawful debts against welfare recipients between 2016 and 2020, cost the Commonwealth $565M by the Royal Commission's own count, and — as of 2026 — none of the Commission's recommended legislative framework has been implemented. The conditions that produced it still exist across at least eleven agencies. The brief, GDES30002 at the University of Melbourne, was to pick a contemporary Australian issue and design a campaign that could actually move on it.

I built TRACE, a design-activism brand that follows the system's own pipeline — Tracked, Recorded, Analysed, Collected, Exploited — back on itself, naming who made each automated decision and demanding the right to appeal it. The register is forensic evidence, not protest poster: off-white stock, forensic black, one evidentiary red that only ever flags, a hand-drawn pixel wordmark on a 24×29 grid, and a bureaucratic spine of redaction bars, form identifiers, and evidence stamps repeated across all eighteen artefacts. Positioned between Forensic Architecture's evidence-led argument, AlgorithmWatch's cold institutional register, and #NotMyDebt's grassroots volume.

TRACE is a design-activism brand built for Brief 2B, GDES30002, at the University of Melbourne. The anchor case is Robodebt: a welfare automation programme that ran 2016–2020, was ruled unlawful, and raised 470,000+ debts the Commonwealth had no legal right to claim. The Royal Commission reported in 2023 linking the scheme to severe financial and psychological distress. As of 2026, none of its recommended legislative framework has been implemented — the conditions that produced it still exist across at least eleven agencies.

The name is the argument. TRACE stands for Tracked, Recorded, Analysed, Collected, Exploited — the pipeline the system runs on citizens. TRACE follows that pipeline in reverse: making each decision visible, naming who made it, and demanding the right to appeal. "An algorithm decided you owed the money. No human reviewed it before the letter went out."

The dominant narrative says automation is neutral and efficient. TRACE rejects that. Every automated decision encodes the values of the people who built it — Robodebt was not a technical error, it was a political choice made to look like a calculation.

Audience: politically engaged Australians, 25–45, who already follow public-interest journalism and care about civil liberties but haven't yet connected data privacy to government welfare automation — the people who shared Robodebt coverage in 2023 and have since moved on. Secondary: journalists, policy researchers, and parliamentary staffers working on the Privacy Act review.

The visual system reads as forensic evidence, not protest poster: off-white document stock, forensic black, a single evidentiary red that never decorates — if FLAG appears, something is being flagged. Three typefaces, one register: TRACE Pixel Display (a custom stencil face drawn glyph-by-glyph on a 24×29 unit grid, titles only) carries the low-fi system-output read of a dot-matrix printer or early Centrelink terminal; PP Neue Montreal Mono does the working copy with the bureaucratic restraint of a Swiss form face; Inter handles long-form body text only, never headlines. Six recurring elements — redaction bar, FORM TR/ identifier, case identifier, evidence stamp, document rules, pixel glyph at scale — appear on every artefact as the bureaucratic spine of the system, turned against itself.

Eighteen artefacts ship across print, motion, social, document, correspondence, and wearable: three A2 wheatpaste posters ("You are a number." / "Refuse the score." / "Not my debt."), a manifesto, a full lockup system, a citizen ID card design-fiction, social cuts at 9:16 and 1:1, a three-second glitch bumper, an open letter, a press release, and a live cursor-driven web tool where every dot on the grid is a person inside an automated decision system — move the cursor and it leaks their reference number, postcode, risk score, and debt, the same way the algorithm does.

References stack three traditions: Forensic Architecture for evidence-led visual argument (the work looks like evidence because it is evidence), AlgorithmWatch for the cold, factual, non-emotional register (outrage is the reader's response, not the campaign's voice), and #NotMyDebt for the volume play — "Robodebt" was the name activists coined, TRACE applies a deliberate visual frame on top of it.