Coin

Challenge

How do you visualize the absurdity of bureaucratic warfare—and make it felt?

COIN began as an inquiry into the U.S. military’s infamous Counterinsurgency (COIN) diagram: a sprawling systems map filled with arrows, loops, and jargon, meant to explain how to “win hearts and minds.” The visual complexity was absurd. But it wasn’t a joke. It was policy—deployed in real wars, with real consequences.

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I wanted to translate this PowerPoint hallucination into something enduring.
Not a critique from the outside, but a tactile embodiment of cultural collision.

Solution

I reimagined the COIN diagram not as a digital file—but as a hand-woven Afghan war rug.
A medium traditionally used to mourn and remember violence became the surface for an imperial logic model.

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Key conceptual elements:

•  Medium as message: The rug critiques the original diagram by making it intimate, slow, physical—everything war planning is not
• Systems-as-culture: By translating systems design into craft, I challenged the notion that complexity equals wisdom
• Symbolic friction: COIN, a tool of U.S. military occupation, reframed through Afghan labor and textile tradition—visualizing a geopolitical tension at the object level

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Impact

• Developed as a centerpiece for a larger body of work on systems failure and imperial aesthetics
• Used in lectures and talks on visual semiotics, trauma, and institutional critique
• Informed ongoing research on how design shapes belief, particularly within policy, defense, and humanitarian sectors
• Cited in conversations around ethical design, cultural intelligence, and decolonial aesthetics

Role

Concept designer, systems strategist, and visual storyteller. I originated the idea, conducted cultural and semiotic research, worked with textile collaborators, and developed the narrative arc and documentation. This wasn’t a project about conflict. It was about how diagrams fail us—and what remains when they do.

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