A black cover. A white cross. A place to write your name. Inside, a soldier’s career accumulates in stamps, stickers, and handwritten dates. Then you notice the course in micro-hydroelectricity. The drought assignment. The instructions for borrowing a neighbor’s old router.

An ordinary document, closely observed

We developed E-Miliz with armasuisse Science and Technology around a familiar Swiss object: the military service booklet. It records recruitment, training, assignments, and promotions. It is also personal. Someone writes in it. Someone stamps it. Someone carries it for years.

That combination gave us a way to follow a soldier whose work includes protecting natural resources and organizing local communities. Changes in climate, infrastructure, and technology appear through the paperwork of an individual life. A training course needs a name. A qualification needs a sticker. A new duty needs instructions.

What does service ask of a person?

The booklet gives that question several very particular forms. A soldier carries a water-testing kit and works with civilian volunteers. A training record mixes physical attendance with remote service. A phone has a camouflage mode. Household equipment can be requisitioned to restore a local communications network.

The small obligations interest me as much as the equipment. Explain why you are at someone’s door. Tell them how their equipment will be used, and for how long. Consider their safety. Compensate for damage. Return what you borrowed. There is a line for the soldier’s signature.

We worked across the scale of a department’s remit and the wording of a form. The result holds those scales together: national service, a village without a network, a person reading what they have been asked to sign.

What we made

• A service bookletA complete document with a soldier’s record, qualifications, equipment instructions, and codes of conduct, available in French and German.
• A graphic vocabularyStamps, training stickers, diagrams, and phone-mode symbols that give each duty a recognizable place on the page.
• Materials for working through the bookletPrompts for annotating procedures, questioning its assumptions, and adding other forms of civilian participation.

The booklet can be read from cover to cover or opened at one troublesome instruction. Readers can write in the margins, propose another qualification, or question what a soldier is entitled to ask of a civilian. The work gives those questions names, images, and a place on the page.

Conceptualisation, research, and design by Near Future Laboratory, in collaboration with Quentin Ladetto at deftech, the technology foresight research programme of armasuisse Science and Technology. Photography: Nicolas Nova.

E-Soldat — the booklet and project