How to communicate libre graphics?
Brainstorm by participants in the workshop Estación Nómada de Diseño (Libre Graphics Workstation) at Central de Diseño /DIMAD Image: Myriam Cea
Category Archives: Vocabulary
forget that you are
i P a d (Michael Murtaugh's melted version for Prototyping Futures) I am enjoying Household Words, an associative analysis of 'common-sensical' words such as Sucker, Bloomers, and Bombshell. In her last chapter, Cyber, Stephanie A. Smith refers to On the road to intimacy, a 1992 whitepaper calling for the development of 'personal digital assistants'. The [...]
A Dictionary of Received Ideas
Her colleagues often repeated that 'there is no perfect solution to a design problem'. Rebecca was pretty sure she had read it somewhere within the context of computer science or learning technology but after looking all over, she still had not found a solid source for the idea. After posting her question to the mailinglist, [...]
Pen and paper
For the 5th edition of the Libre Graphics Meeting, OSP proposed to replace the paint splash by an abstract drawing of three squares forming a flag and also the letter M.1 The splash had been in use since 2006 and some community members felt alienated by the proposal. On 10/10/2009 AL explained on the CREATE-mailinglist: "The [...]
Don't read
Exercise for next week: "From the phrase Don't read, a line extends horizontally and then angles diagonally downward to the word Take, from which extend three short lines that connect the words paper, rods, blocks to the rest of the phrase. To the right of this cluster is the phrase, set them out, color, build" [...]
Co-position from scratch
On 5 October the Co-position team will travel from Amsterdam, Brussels and Porto to meet in Eindhoven (NL) at Baltan Laboratories. Co-position is the title of the thread at the Libre Graphics Research Unit focusing on digital tools for lay-out. This particular compartment of the (Libre) graphics toolbox is very much defined through historical practices [...]
Maquette
With SARMA ('an artistic and discursive laboratory for criticism, dramaturgy, research and creation in the field of dance and beyond') AL + SV are developing an on-line archive for oral histories, a branch of the Active Archives platform. How to imagine a software together? KVDB responded with this astute sketch.
The killer argument
Question: "But what would be the real advantage of developing free software tools, if soon proprietary ones will offer you the same 'hackability' (through APIs for example), or what if they would even be more flexible?" Answer: "More interesting frictions?" After discussing the "many cans of worms that have been hiding behind the glossy, happy-go-lucky, [...]
Shape and orient
Tools shape orient practice Practice shapes orients tools We are imagining the future of Constant this afternoon. At some point, we discuss Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others, a book by Sara Ahmed we like. She uses queer both in the sense of sexual as in spatial orientation; literally thinking through what that means for bodies [...]
Software For People
In response to an audience member who complained about a certain WordPress functionality, Matt Mulleweg1 said: "The Software is Wrong, Not the People"2. Shifting the responsibility from People to Software, Mulleweg was applauded for being sensitive to user-demands. "[It] should be the motto for all software companies"3 But with his statement he also confirmed popular [...]
Discretion and continuity
PH reports from a long conversation with PM. They have settled on the word-pair 'discretion' and 'continuity' to describe the rigid and yet fluid character of computated lay-out. I'll need to go back to JH and finally pick up on the discussion we had on Code vs. Canvas, and about guessing and aiming.