AQUA: Disruption (The Rules)
Summary
AQUA’s “Disruption” (working title “The Rules”) is a collection of open-source, highly visual tactical guides produced by a creative-activism collective working in climate and systemic-change campaigns. The guides sit at the boundary between tactic and design object — they are meant to be printed, posted, and shared as much as read — and they are most useful for the visual-arts practitioner who is bringing tactical content into a non-text medium.
Body
AQUA’s guides package a tactic and a visual treatment together. [source: aqua-disruption] Each guide typically opens with a short tactical overview (what the action is, what it accomplishes, what its risks are) and then presents the same content as a one-pager, an infographic, or a poster layout that an activist can print and use in a non-text medium (a wall, a march, a workshop handout). [source: aqua-disruption]
The collective’s orientation is creative-activism, meaning the tactical content is deliberately subordinated to the question of how the action reads visually and emotionally. [source: aqua-disruption] This is useful when a campaign needs tactical content for an audience that does not read long-form text, and it is less useful when the campaign needs the operational depth of a multi-step tactical plan. [source: aqua-disruption]
The guides are published under a permissive licence, and the collective encourages re-publication with credit. [source: aqua-disruption] Several campaigns have adapted AQUA guides for their own tactical libraries, particularly in climate and food-justice work where visual identity is a campaign priority. [source: aqua-disruption]
Because the guides are visual first, the wiki captures them at Reference tier rather than Core: they are not a substitute for the operational depth of the tactical canon (Beautiful Trouble, Commons Tactics Toolkit, the Sharp methods), but they are an unusually accessible on-ramp to tactical content for visual learners. [source: aqua-disruption]
Use it for
A source of visual treatments for a tactical campaign that needs non-text material; a teaching aid in a workshop with visual learners; a benchmark for what a creative-activism publication looks like.