View source for Chapter 1: Design & Collectivity

Design and Collectivity

Summary\
Within the contemporary design landscape much attention has been paid to
modes of designing together, emphasizing process over outcomes, and
inviting *others* (other human and non-human perspectives) into the
process. Yet, even though such perspectives have contributed to a
critical design discourse, they remain attached to, and therefore
insufficiently question, the notion of a \'purposeful\' relation between
design and collectivity.

This chapter discusses aspects of collective practice that designerly
articulations fall short of addressing; that is, the implications of a
reciprocal entanglement of collective practice with unstable working and
living conditions\
\
Introduction

My affinity for collective practice has evolved along with my practice
as a designer, educator and organizer. This affinity has shaped
particular affiliations and commitments, as well as a design approach
and aesthetics. I have been interested in involving *others* in design
processes: other people, other tools, other conditions, other materials.
Involving others, as I see it, is not a method or a goal in itself---as
opposed to participatory design, where the design process follows a
certain goal by involving others, i.e. to improve design processes or
outcomes. More so, designing with others can be an \'excuse\' to imagine
being and doing things together differently from how it might have been
conventionally done. The desire to design with *others* *differently*
derives from frustrations with how design is taught in schools and
practiced in the professional design field. Collective practices offer
possibilities to temporarily imagine and test out alternative forms of
organizing life and work. Designing as part of collective practice is
not about designing better or designing faster, but relates to what
Lauren Berlant described as \"an imaginary for managing the meanwhile
within damaged life\'s perdurance, a meanwhile that is less an end
\[but\] allows for ambivalence, distraction, antagonism and inattention
not to destroy collective existence.\"[^1]

It is difficult to articulate collective aspects of design practice in a
manner that does justice to its relational and contingent tendencies.
Collectivity, as I understand it and discuss it in this thesis,
challenges notions of individual authorship, differentiations between
disciplines, between product and process or between the user and maker.
\'Things\' that evolve with collectivity---i.e. publications, tools,
technical infrastructure as well as social conduct---require
unconventional design criteria to determine their purpose, or lack
thereof. Such criteria are context-specific. They are imagined and
articulated spontaneously, unexpectedly and may be abandoned instantly.
Thus, it is difficult to speak about such collective aspects in general
terms. Collectivity-in-action seems to constantly challenge and erode
boundaries, organizational hierarchies, boundaries between formal
planning and spontaneous impulse, between friendship and work
relationships.

It has always been challenging for me to design *for* collectives,
especially those that I was involved with closely. How to express and
account for collective practices---environments that are described
entirely differently depending on who you ask? Collectivity is in
constant flux and so are those who it (temporarily) binds together. How
to design for and along with collectivity; that is, how to negotiate
collective dynamics, their resistance to confinement, their reciprocal,
as well as vulnerable tendencies?

Collectivity is often confused with other notions of working together.
However, collectivity is not equal or approximate to collaboration or
teamwork.[^2] Collectivity deviates from concepts such as
\'collectivism\', the \'commons\', or \'cooperation\' that focus on
norms and values of social groups, deliberate organizational formats for
living, working or being together. The artist collective Ruangrupa's
description of itself as an "organism without fixed structure"[^3]
aligns more with my experience of working with collectives. This
description indicates that there may be contingencies at play in
collective practices. In her text \"Art is Going Underground\", Janneke
Wesseling also refers Ruangrupa and describes a tendency in contemporary
collective art practices toward the \"ephemeral, changing, and
processual: it is open and indefinite, more an open-ended assemblage
than a definable object.\"[^4]

Collective design practice, as it is discussed in this dissertation, is
a result of processes that are not successive nor fully comprehensible.
Collectives are also a result of particular socio-economic,
socio-technical conditions and intersections that pervade and shape
working conditions, often in unforeseen and perhaps undesirable ways.
Therefore, collective design practices require utterances that do not
presume them to be the resolution to a problem.

Some artists/designers have found means of articulating \'feral\'[^5]
aspects of collectivity, embracing the incompatibilities of working
collectively within prevailing systems of arts and culture. They move
between the spheres of economics and art, logistics, ecosystems and
technical infrastructure, friendship and business. The \'trade artist\'
and \'feral economist\', Kate Rich established an \"artist-run grocery
business and underground freight network, trading coffee, olive oil,
dried bamboo shoots and other vital goods outside official channels
since 2003.\"[^6] Goods are traded in \"spare baggage space of friends,
colleagues and passing acquaintances, while museums, offices, hotel
reception desks, and other quasi-public places act as trans-shipment
points and depots\"[^7]. The project \"Light Logistics\" by the
collective Display Distribute is another example of an \'inefficient\'
global courier system for artist publications described as \"a free but
not-in-time service.\"[^8]

Such collective utterances cannot be pinned to one location, product or
artist. They play with unreliability, and embrace a complex of issues,
while resisting the impulse to offer a solution to these complexities.
Along the way, they develop relational articulations that cannot really
be considered examples of collectivity in a sense that an example is
akin to a stencil. An example can be reproduced. Yet the unreliability
of collectivity resists cookie cutter ideas about what constitutes such
collectivity. Collective practices are situated. They are site, context,
and time-specific, and so are their various expressions. They weave
together a range of places, legacies, objects and people across
practices, disciplines, and timelines.

This chapter defines collectivity in relative rather than absolute
terms. As opposed to speaking from the position of a generalized \'we,\'
I will take a personal approach and draw connections between my
experiences of collectivity-in-action on the one hand, and, on the
other, draw from various legacies, writings and practices that have
inspired and challenged me, and have inevitably informed this research
which grapples with the complicated relationship between collectivity
and design.

Beginning with the section \'Collective beginnings\', I will trace my
attraction to collectivity in order to explicate how my understanding
and problematization of collectivity has changed over time, and is
intertwined with personal, subjective experiences, i.e. frustrations
about a lack of possible outlooks or points of orientation within the
established field of design.

In the section *\'*(Un)disciplinarity\', I continue to address how
collectivity tends to be conceptualized in moments of disorientation,
taking as an example the discussion around eroding disciplinary
boundaries and specializations in design. \'The collective\', or
\'collective approaches\' tend to be put forward as a possible
resolution to issues at stake. What is set aside, in assuming
collectivity as a solution to \'de-disciplining\', is that collectivity
may be not a tool to resolve the issues of disorientation but may also
be a symptom of the crisis of design disciplines.

In the section \'Self-organized\' I will connect the ways in which
collective articulation is enmeshed with unstable, unreliable
conditions. Vocabularies that tend to evolve from collective practice,
phrases of empowerment and self-determination, such as
\"self-organization\" to some degree reinforce precarious working,
learning and living conditions.

The following passage \'Specialized amateurs\' discusses the manner in
which socio-technical relationships evolve along with collective design
practice to create *other* kinds of relationships, affinities, and
affiliations, that seem to be \'looser\' than the relation between an
\'expert\' designer and their specialized tools. Collective sites and
situations bring together people who approach tools, methods and
conditions for the first time, and test out tool-designer relationships
that have not yet established dependencies, expectations of
purposefulness or efficiency.

The manner in which collective design processes are actualized cannot be
traced in linear ways, or analyzed from a single vantage point. A
collective designing requires articulations that shift the focus away
from the *who* or *what* of a design process towards *how* and *why*. In
the final section \'Approaching the \'we\' in collective practice\', I
will introduce and contextualize the method of writing and designing
*with* collectivity as a way of approaching and accounting for design
practices that are distributed across different people, technical
objects, timelines, fields of knowledge and socio-economic realities.

Collective beginnings

> [Loose commitments]{.underline}
>
> I remember sitting in a park with my friends, in the summer of 2007.
> We were all students in design and talked about starting *something*
> together, a collective. We wanted to do \'self-initiated\' *projects*,
> rather than design *products*. Projects that mattered, with people we
> cared about. After our meeting we created email addresses --- a first
> step towards our collective endeavor. Each of our emails would start
> with the word \"sagmal\"[^9]:
>
> [[sagmal@jeannetteweber.com]{.underline}](mailto:sagmal@jeannetteweber.com)
>
> [[sagmal@thomasrustemeyer.com]{.underline}](mailto:sagmal@thomasrustemeyer.com)
>
> [[sagmal@anjagroten.com]{.underline}](mailto:sagmal@anjagroten.com)
>
> Adding this prompt to our email addresses allowed us to sustain our
> individual web domains while being able to share the pun at the
> beginning --- a loose commitment towards our imagined collective
> future.
>
> We never started \'the collective\' Yet, I still use the email address
> [[sagmal@anjagroten.com]{.underline}](mailto:sagmal@anjagroten.com)
> almost every day --- a remnant of that short energizing moment in the
> park, of imagining a future practice together.

Self-organized collectives often emerge during moments of uncertainty,
frustration or (dis)orientation. The Dutch artist researcher Ruchama
Noorda described collectives as \"\[e\]xperiments in communal living
\[that are\] building around a rejection of individualism and private
property, and \[are\] based on principles running directly counter to
the laws and norms of capitalist societies.\"[^10] Yet, in my
experience, while often driven by a certain frustration with the status
quo, collectives do not necessarily set themselves apart from prevailing
societal, political, ecological, disciplinary developments, but rather
try to relate and interact differently with such conditions. Collective
practices do not stand in opposition to, but are intertwined with and
are affected by multiple realities, economies and timelines. Collectives
seem to be in constant flux, taking turns and merging into one another,
and therefore cannot be easily located, anticipated or explained in
terms of absolute beginnings or endings, or as an antidote to existing
systems. As I illustrated using the anecdote of a group of friends
sitting in a park imagining starting a \'design collective\',
collectives seem to be not plannable in that way. The prompt \"Let\'s
start a collective!\" may set into motion a process of imagining *other*
affiliations, other than those commonly known and accepted within the
field of design. Collective imaginaries seem to fill gaps temporarily
and accommodate moments of (dis)orientation, in our case the moment
between study and our future professional lives. In such moments, the
meaning of collectivity, the perception of their importance or perhaps
even their redundancy is shaped and carried by shared excitement or lack
thereof.

Contingency and imagination seem significant to the manner in which
collectives are actualized. To take H&D as an example, the formation of
H&D was not decided upon or planned in a causal manner. Yet, there are
conditions in place allowing for H&D to evolve. There is a certain
ecosystem of self-employed practitioners who work at the intersection of
art, design, computer programming and education, and attend H&D events.
They often do so at moments of (re)orientation, when they feel the need
to expand their networks, acquaint themselves with new skills or to meet
new friends. As a collective, H&D\'s evolves along with the interests of
its individual members and the larger community around it. Many of the
people who are involved with H&D are also involved with other
collectives and projects simultaneously, and intersect socio-technical
conducts, software repositories, peculiar terminologies, organizing
principles, learning methods from various contexts.

It is therefore rather difficult to determine or define collectives in
terms of absolute beginnings or endings. Yet, there are moments of
shared memories that seem to create a stable picture of \'the
collective\'. For example, a commonly told story at the beginning of the
H&D collective---the moment when \'we\' organized our first
workshop-based event in 2013 under the title \"Hackers & Designers\".
The constellation of people involved with H&D at the time has changed
significantly since this first event. The organizers grew from three to
nine members and not everyone who was involved in 2013 still
participates.[^11] Yet, such narratives of collective beginnings are
reproduced over and over again until they solidify and are accepted as a
shared conception of a beginning, of a turning point, or an end point.

To recap: A collective beginning may be determined only in retrospect,
and *begins* to solidify within the progression of a collective
narrative, along with evolving collective vocabularies and
socio-technical conducts. While initially not perceived or planned as
such, the evolving narrative of the \'collective beginning\' binds a
collective together. An email address materializes an imagined and yet
deferred collective beginning. Articulating collective beginnings in
relative / relational / contingent terms recalibrates the perception of
\'a collective\' from being deliberate and purposeful, towards
collectivity as something that may *design itself* to some extent, that
responds to and results from specific and multiple contexts.

In an attempt to locate my own personal collective beginning, my
motivation for my involvement with H&D, I may need to go as far as
trying to understand my attraction towards collectivity as such. I
reflect on my experiences as a design student and on working as an
emerging designer in the design field in Germany and the Netherlands
between 2003 and 2011. In the next section, I will attend to the ways in
which my conception of collectivity and my interest in it, are
intertwined with the experience of (dis)orientation within the field of
design, including certain frustrations with design as a discipline (an
established field), practice (something I am involved in shaping, and
reproducing) and concept (a system of thought).[^12]

(Un)disciplinarity

When I studied communication design from 2003 to 2008 in Germany, I did
not encounter many examples of collective practices within the field of
design. \'Best design practices\' were usually represented by
individuals---charismatic designers who led design studios and creative
agencies. The tale of the iconic designer included predominantly white
and male, either European or North-American individuals. Their design
studios were named after their personal names (Studio Borsche, Bureau
Mario Lombardo, Stefan Sagmeister, Eikes Grafischer Hort). The name
branding also extended into the courses they taught in design schools
(Klasse Hickmann, Klasse Hesse, Klasse Uwe Lösch). These predominant
figures were recurrently featured in design symposia, design blogs,
magazines and books.\
In comparison to Dutch art and design education, in Germany individual
\'masters\', seems to be pronounced more explicitly, in the way
curricula are designed. Yet, design discourses' preoccupation with
individualized design icons is not a uniquely German phenomenon. In her
paper \"Is there a canon of graphic design history\" Martha Scotford
took a close look at what and who was represented most frequently in the
historical literature on graphic design (in the European and
North-American context). She posited that there is a graphic design
\'canon\', which she critiqued as creating \" heroes, superstars, and
iconographies.\"[^13] However, according to Scotford \"\[i\]n singling
out individual designers and works, we may lose sight of the range of
communication, expression, concepts, techniques, and formats that make
up the wealth of graphic design history.\"[^14] Recalling my experience
as a design student at the time, these icons of graphic design spurred
the realization that most of them seemed to represent what I was *not*
or did not want to be: Loud, provocative, competitive. I was seeking
forms and manners that allowed for ambivalence and being disoriented
together, formats for trying things out in the classroom---in the
presence of others, leaving things unresolved, picking up where someone
else left off.

In *Glossary of Undisciplined Design* (2021) the editors Anja Kaiser and
Rebecca Stephany, themselves both graphic designers and design
educators, write:

> *\"Where there is discipline, there is a master--as design schools
> continue to be the official sites of \"learning design,\" they remain
> hubs for the introduction, transmission and normalization of
> connections for \"good design.\" Implied in the very texture of any
> design study program is the legitimization of certain conceptual and
> aesthetic tools and ideas, substantiated by a corresponding canon and
> the role models -- through naming of courses, through the appointment
> of teachers, through their respective internalized convictions, to the
> belief system behind a foundation course.\"*[^15]

I experienced study as a time of orientation, a process of making sense
of the design field and trying to find a way to relate to it. Yet, what
left me rather disoriented was the perception of the design discipline
as somewhat immutable, i.e. through certain prefigured conceptions of
expertise, skills, and \'best design practices\', rather than something
I could actively participate in shaping. Today design practices are
typified by fluidity, "that regularly traverse, transcend and
transfigure historical disciplinary and conceptual boundaries."[^16] New
adjectives are frequently added to design lexicons, such as service
design,[^17] social design,[^18] open design,[^19] critical design,
speculative design,[^20] design thinking.[^21] Paul A. Rodgers and Craig
Bremner wrote extensively about the dilution of solid historic
disciplinary boundaries in design into indeterminable pieces. According
to Rodgers and Bremner "fluid patterns of employment within and between
traditional design disciplines,\"[^22] have become commonplace. "The
fragmentation of distinct disciplines has shifted creative practice from
being discipline-based to issue or project-based,"[^23] which may be the
cause of recurring existential crises when asked the all too familiar
question: "What do you do?", "I'm a designer." "What kind? Graphic?
Fashion? Furniture? Interior?."[^24]

Following Eleni Kalantidiou and Tony Fry\'s concept of
border-thinking,[^25] designer and researcher Danah Abdullah calls for
an erosion of borders between different specializations within design
altogether, rather than expanding design into other fields and
developing yet another form of disciplinarity. Instead, Abdullah
proposes, design should move towards more collective approaches.[^26]
She does not define what is precisely meant by \'collective approaches\'
here but, in my reading, Abdullah\'s appeal to collective approaches,
conveys a belief in collectivity's ability to renegotiate boundaries
between affiliation, expertise and dominating knowledge systems.

I can relate to the anxiety of not being able to explain or defend what
I am doing as a design practitioner on the one hand. On the other hand,
I resist fitting into pre-established disciplinary categories. It is
perhaps precisely that unfulfilled desire for other forms of affiliation
that binds me to the collectives I am involved in. However, I have also
come to understand that collectives do not function as antidotes to
disciplinarity but are implied in different ways in a certain crisis of
design disciplines. This involves the fragmentation and dissolving of
established boundaries between design fields. The people I am involved
with in collective work are usually freelancers, working in and
in-between many fields and institutions, and not entirely recognized by
any. Collective practices, and those who they bring together, negotiate
many different, at times precarious realities at the same time, which
also determines what can and cannot be done and how much one can rely on
them.

The desire for belonging is perpetuated every time I use the word
\'we\', and when I refer to H&D. Yet it is perhaps impossible to
\'belong\' to a collective, in the possessive, or stable sense of the
term 'belonging'. Collectives do not fix or replace the insufficiency of
established domains, disciplines, institutions. Collectives are
unreliable and difficult to discipline---they are not a recipe, not an
entity, not a site, or a method---yet they may involve all of these
things. By challenging fixed definitions, I do not intend to \"throw
everything into the same pot, to efface the distinct features of the
various parts within the collective.\"[^27] Design and collectivity
develop relationships but they cannot be presupposed as relationships of
utility and therefore require context-specific nuances when articulating
and practicing collectivity. Working *with* or being involved *with*
collectives, rather than \"*at* H&D we do...\" , or \"I am working at
H&D\" is an important difference. In my view, such nuances differentiate
collectivity and collectives from other modes of working together.

To recap: In this section I discussed how collectivity tends to be
conceptualized in moments of disorientation, taking as an example the
crises of disciplines in the field of design. The call for a
\'collective approach\' presumes collective design practice to act as a
potential resolution to conditions which have brought about
disorientation. What is disregarded in articulating collectivity as a
suitable response to \'de-disciplining\' is the possibility that
collectivity may also be a repercussion and/or be perpetuating unstable
conditions. Yet, thinking with Sara Ahmed\'s queer phenomenology,[^28] I
came to wonder if a state of disorientation could also become the
starting point for moving towards other understandings and articulations
of affiliation that may be more reflective of their entanglements with
the environments they find themselves involved in.

Self-organized

The notion of \'self-organization\' often occurs along with
collectivity. The term is often used interchangeably with
\'self-initiated\' or \'artist-run\'. \"Taking things into one\'s own
hands\" is often connoted with empowerment and self-determination. H&D
did not intend to become \'an\' organization. It seemed to grow and
mature by itself. As a self-organized collective, H&D could also be
understood as an accidental collision of people and conditions---as if
it has organized itself. There was no prefigured plan or distinct moment
where organizational principles were explicitly decided upon and then
followed through. Following up on the previous section in which I hinted
at the ways articulations of collectivity tend to be used to temporarily
fill gaps, I will now move to a discussion of my time at the Sandberg
Instituut in Amsterdam. This institution has close connections to my
practice as a designer and educator, in addition to my activities as a
member of the H&D collective. Many of H&D\'s members studied art and
design at Sandberg Instituut too. I will reflect upon my experience of
this educational environment as a design student and then as an
educator, with particular attention paid to the ways tropes of
collectivity as supposed forms of empowerment, articulated through
principles of 'self-organization', are perpetuated within such an
institution.

At the time I commenced the Master course in Design at the Sandberg
Instituut in 2009, disciplinary boundaries or affiliations were not
really of concern. I was motivated to apply by what I knew about the
educational culture at this department, a self-determined approach to
studying and designing. I recall that during talks with classmates and
tutors at the design department, the notion of \'collectivity\' recurred
frequently and alongside \'self-initiation\' or \'self-organization\'. I
remember the former department head, Annelys de Vet, telling us students
upon our arrival in the first week: \"This is a space in which you can
self-organize. That also means, if you just sit on your chair and wait,
nothing is going to happen.\" I perceived this statement as an
invitation to us students to become actively involved in shaping the
curriculum and the learning environment. To me, it was an expression of
trust in our abilities to take things into our own hands.

In the book *Self-organisation/Counter-Economic Strategies* (2006), the
Superflex collective wrote in their introduction that the concept of
self-organization is often \"used in relation to certain kinds of social
groups or networks; in this context, the term does not have a strict
definition, but broadly speaking it refers to groups that are
independent of institutional or corporate structures, are
non-hierarchical open and operate participatory decision-making
processes.\"[^29] When I think back to my arrival at the Design
Department and how we were prompted to self-organize from the get-go, I
also have to think about how it had actually been a struggle to get
myself organized in the first year of my Master studies at the Sandberg
Instituut. Nothing in this environment was as I knew it from my German
design education. In addition to there being no seminars, grades or
assignments, the difference between art and design did not seem to
matter to the department. The manner in which the Design Department of
the Sandberg Instituut sustained a certain openness and flexibility
towards students\' changing needs and interests, is reminiscent of the
ways in which curricula, criteria and social conduct were developed \'on
the go\' at the Haagse Vrije Academie (HVA), which opened its doors in
1947 in The Hague (and closed in 2015). As part of her PhD dissertation,
art historian Saskia Gras researched the history of the HVA and the ways
in which the pedagogical approaches were perceived by the students.[^30]
At the HVA the notion of expertise and disciplinarity and what commonly
qualified as art and design, was fundamentally challenged.

The artist Livinus van de Bundt was inspired by Parisian académies
libres, \'Progressive education\' (Montessori education) and founded the
HVA on the basis of the idea that an art school should be open to anyone
who has the ambition to study but perhaps lacks the financial means or
academic qualification. The KABK (Royal College of Art The Hague), which
was at the time the other---more established---art academy in The Haque,
was perceived by educators and students at HVA as a normative and
authoritative form of art education, and pushed students to work towards
predetermined artistic goals. At HVA there were no fixed goals or
criteria for assessing students\' work. The notion of freedom was
understood in a way that the students themselves should define their own
criteria for \'good\' and \'bad\' art and design. The personal growth of
a student was more important than the outcomes they produced or the time
it took them to accomplish their studies.

Gras also points out that the manner in which the HVA was
(dis)organized[^31] seemed intertwined with the ways students affiliated
strongly with the learning environment. Students were involved in
decision-making, thus they took part in shaping the learning
environment. Gras writes about the emphasis on connecting artistic
exploration to social and political questions---however, not from an
intangible distance, but from *within* the organization and the
sociality of the learning environment itself. The notion of the social
was constituted by the ways people came together to organize, learn and
produce art and design, which in turn influenced the very structure and
mentality of the learning environment, and the ways students developed
as makers.

I came to wonder about the implication of chaos as an organizing
principle within learning institutions today, about potential issues
arising from asking students to self-organize, that is, when
self-organization is not a mode of self-actualization but a prerequisite
to sustain continuity for education. In her essay \"The Tyranny of
Structurelessness\" (2019), Jo Freeman critiqued the prevailing
structureless organizing principles of social justice movements, more
specifically the US women's liberation movement in the 1970s. According
to Freeman striving for \'structurelessness\' in organizations is as
useful as it is deceptive:

> *\"*The idea of \'structurelessness,\' however, has moved from a
> healthy counter to these tendencies to become a goddess in its own
> right \[...\] People would try to use the \'structureless\' group and
> the informal conference for purposes for which they were unsuitable
> out of a blind belief that no other means could possibly be anything
> but oppressive*.\"*[^32]

Today, the students at the Design Department of the Sandberg Instituut,
the same institution where I studied 12 years ago, tell me stories about
their experiences studying at the department that are similar to my own.
When social ties and affiliations within a group have not been
established, the task of self-organizing can actually become a lonely
struggle. When everything is mutable and responsive to change, an
environment can become rather difficult to navigate. While the idea of
self-organization and self-determinacy is charismatic and attractive,
cited by many students as reasons for wanting to study at the Design
Department, they also experience recurrent disorientation and ask for
more structure. It is challenging to respond to these changing needs
within a structure that builds upon principles of structurelessness.
Under neoliberal conditions that are also very apparent inside learning
institutions (for example, tutors at the Sandberg Instituut are hired as
freelancers with short-term hourly agreements), prevailing fragmentation
and flexibilization of work conditions, study and life, the relationship
between self-organization and precarization are closely interlinked, and
continue for students after their studies are concluded, and for tutors
after they leave the classroom. The H&D collective may be a continuation
of such unstable conditions that already evolved when we were still in
art school.

> [Ahead of ourselves]{.underline}\
> We were on a bike ride from the last H&D Summer Academy in 2018
> towards the location where we would celebrate, dance and eat together.
> Juliette and I euphorically reflected on the experiences we just had,
> while negotiating the Amsterdam traffic and a group of twenty summer
> academy participants trying to follow us on their bikes.\
> We felt energized and forged plans for possible next iterations of
> this annual intensive workshop program and were eager to share our
> ideas with the rest of the group -- all the while feeling a slight
> guilt about forestalling a more equitable process of proposing and
> discussing ideas between all members of the collective.

At a distance H&D may be perceived as \'an organization\', a cohesive
whole. From within, the experience of self-organizing can be more
blurred, as \'one thing leading to another\', which can make it
difficult to uphold the conception of self-organization as an
emancipatory act, or an empowering process. The \'self-\' of a
collective is not easy to discern in terms of *who* or *what* takes
part. There is a definition of self-organization that may be more
suitable to understand collectivity-in-action. Deriving from the natural
sciences, self-organization describes how particular systems \"have a
tendency to develop, and take new and more complex forms, in a seemingly
unplanned fashion without the influence of an external or central
authority.\"[^33] In this estimation, self-organization is then not
about **in**dependence but **inter**dependence, about coming-into-being
as a process of mutual entanglements.

Being involved in self-organization in the context of the H&D
collective, I experience it as an inventive praxis that requires
constant (self-)reflexivity and reconsideration of organizing
principles, in relation to emerging conditions, other collective
configurations, other contexts, other people, other tools, other
challenges and needs.

In their text \"Nautonomat Operating Manual\'\', the Raqs Media
collective invented a helpful term---\'nautonomy\'. It \"re-articulates
and re-founds the \'self-organizing\' principle inherent in what is
generally understood as autonomy, while recognizing that the entity
mistakenly called \'self\' is actually more precisely an unbounded
constellation of persons, organism and energies that is defined by its
capacity to be a voyager in contact with a moving world.\"[^34]

The concept of *nautonomy* is to some degree illustrated in my anecdote
of the bike ride, where we cycled metaphorically and literally from one
H&D Summer Academy to the next, all the while negotiating (imaginary)
boundaries of unspoken organizational principles. I relate these
indeterminable moments of forging plans, to what Bruno Latour described
as an organizational script. Organizational scripts, according to
Latour, \"circulate through a set of actors that are either assigned
some tasks or are in a momentary state of crisis to re-instruct the
scripts with new instructions for themselves or others.\"[^35]
Oftentimes, it is in unplanned and short-lived moments in which
organizational scripts are re-instructed, spontaneously emerging
epiphanies of looking back and forward, that become transitional. As
such moments switch timelines, people and contexts, and inventive
offshoot ideas evolve into plans for the future.

To recap, in this section I have tried to critically inquire into
whether articulations and actualization of collectivity, of which
\'self-organization\' was my example, may also be manifestation of the
failure to achieve what it seems to promise---for example to create
\'community\', or to function as a form of empowerment. I propose
considering self-organization as critical self-reflexive practice,
intertwined with the unstable conditions we find ourselves in---as a way
of questioning our collective ties. Why and how do we associate with one
another? Our involvement in self-organized collectives may indicate the
manner in which they/we are continuously configured anew and never fully
achieved. In their potential to be inventive, collectives resist
stability. Therefore, in my view, collectivity cannot and should not be
taken as a model or prerequisite for formal organization, that is, to
patch up institutions\' omissions.

Specialized amateurs

Self-organized collectives, such as H&D, necessitate ongoing
(re)articulation of what it is we do, how we do it, why we do it and how
we speak about it. That is, our activities blend people, tools, and
technical infrastructure together, blurring disciplinary boundaries,
distinctions between user and maker, friendships and work relations.
Therefore, collective conditions require a certain self-awareness about
what one is familiar with most likely deviates from what other people
are familiar with (in terms of discipline-specific jargon, daily work
routines, tools and methods, and educational formats). In fragmented and
fast-paced collective organizing, short encounters are the main mode of
operation. H&D workshops bring together people (including the members of
the collective) to do activities we would not usually do in our
individual daily work lives. We experiment with other formats, tools and
methods. Often, it is the state of *not-knowing* that people have in
common in such environments. In the following section, I will
interrogate the different meanings and functions of the \'unfamiliar\'
in relation to design and collective practice.

**Approaching new tools**

In *Blind maps and blue dots* (2021),[^36] Joost Grootens\' proposes an
alternative graphic design history, by focusing on tools, rather than
people or products of graphic design. By shifting the focus, the graphic
designer (a map-maker using expert tools) moves away from the center of
attention. Instead, amateur practices of map-making move to the fore,
and into the realm of graphic design. While Grootens does not explicitly
focus on collective practices, there are a number of aspects from his
proposition for a tool-based history of graphic design that resonate
with my particular inquiry into collective practice and its relation to
design. His reorientation from iconic figures in design (individual
people and objects) to processes and tools, enables other possible
perspectives and graphic design practices. For Grootens, this shift in
focus from individuals towards tools led to considering practices that
may not be recognized as legitimate, but also do not depend on
disciplinary approval or expert tools.

Educated as a graphic designer myself, there was a moment when my
everyday tools, media design software such as Adobe InDesign and
Photoshop, became harder to \'hack\'. That is, it became more difficult
to find pirate copies that I did not have to pay for. Renting software
felt like entering an expensive membership-only club. At the same time
it became increasingly difficult to imagine other tool ecosystems.
Everyone and everything surrounding me seemed to have established
fundamental dependencies on Adobe Creative Suite/Cloud; collaborating
designers, photographers, illustrators, post-production firms, printing
presses.

Design students are not offered many options when it comes to deciding
which design tools they would prefer to work with (invest in, establish
skills in, develop long term relationships with and come to depend on).
While offered at cheaper rates, or for free, or pirated in art schools,
Adobe software is often posited as the only option and is increasingly
hard to avoid. Once a student graduates, it turns into a costly
service---unaffordable for small scale businesses and independent
designers. These discrepancies reinstate arbitrary borders between
\'professional\' and \'amateur\' software use. More than once, I
resolved to break ties with Adobe and to switch instead to free and open
source alternatives entirely (replace Photoshop with Gimp, Illustrator
with Inkscape, InDesign with Scribus). So far, I've only succeeded
sporadically. The moment of complete software make-over is yet to
arrive. I came to understand that it is not solely my individual choice
that determines what tools I work with. Rather, a whole net of
socio-technical relationships have evolved around certain ways of
learning and working in graphic design, which has inevitably solidified
my ties with certain tools, making outright refusal seem inconceivable.
Transformation within socio-technical relationships and practices cannot
be done individually. Rather, such a transformation necessitates a
systemic shift in design practices and software usage.

In the context of H&D\'s, we experiment with publishing tools. These are
self-made, appropriated or repurposed design software that allow us to
create page layouts in an unusual manner. These processes may remind of
generative design principles, where the influence or control of the
designer is limited to predefined variables and the outcome retains a
kind of surprise effect.[^37] At other times, the design process is
rather inefficient and convoluted and requires an extraordinary amount
of manual labor. Such methods and tools break with design habits, the
usual ways to design a page layout,---for instance how it would be done
using layout programs such as InDesign. Furthermore, the process of
developing experimental tools and publications tends to be distributed
across different workshop situations, different people, different
technical infrastructures, and is driven by spontaneous curiosities as
much as by a commitment to capture and share the otherwise ephemeral and
fragmented formats and practices of H&D with others.

Grootens used the term 'amateur' to refer to map-makers who may go
unrecognized as designers by established design disciplines. Such
\'amateur map-makers\' seem to establish other kinds of relationships to
their tools. According to Grootens, the maps they produce are more
truthful in the sense that they display more openly the very process
that brings them into being. By shifting the focus away from
\'professional\' designers and their expert tools, the process of
amateur map-making becomes increasingly visible.[^38] Such amateur maps
are outcomes of a specific kind of tool-designer relationship that is
perhaps not yet marked by discipline-related dependencies. Therefore,
these maps exhibit more about their coming-into-being than a finalized
design object and are thus more discursive. Similarly, the convoluted,
distributed, inefficient manner in which H&D designs publications, may
also function as a tactic to circumnavigate design conventions, but also
to create a community of toolmakers and tool users, and a potential
discourse around *other* possible tool-designer relationships.

> [Small gestures]{.underline}
>
> I participated in a workshop facilitated by An Mertens and Michael
> Murtaugh (\'Constant Association of Art and Media\') during the first
> edition of the H&D Summer Academy in 2015.[^39] I remember one moment
> particularly: An ran a Python script in the command line of her
> computer. I was not familiar with using the command line or Python. I
> followed her actions on a projection on the wall. She typed something
> into the command line and hit enter. An error message appeared.
>
> An\'s response (surprised yet somewhat delighted): \"Interesting!\" I
> remember that I was puzzled by her comfort, as the error message
> somehow seemed threatening to me. An used the occasion to explain how
> error messages can actually be quite generous in the way they expose
> information about how a program functions. The moment taught me
> several things. The importance of not giving up with every occurring
> error, but also how the exposure of unexpected errors can become an
> occasion to work or think through something *together* -- in the
> presence of *others*, how to approach the condition of \'not knowing\'
> not as a weakness but as an opening for others to enter into a
> dialogue.

**Contextualizing amateurism**

The meaning and approach of the \'amateur\' resonated within the context
of H&D (I have literally heard members of the H&D collective proclaiming
\"We are just a bunch of amateurs!\"). However, as I will point out in
the following section, dichotomies such as the amateur and specialized
practitioner need to be considered with caution.

In the context of design practice, the counterpart of the figure of the
amateur is the expert -- a person who is experienced and knowledgeable,
someone who obtained control over a specific skill, or holds authority
in a specific field of knowledge. In *The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five
Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation* (1987) Jacques Rancière recounts
the story of a school teacher, Joseph Jacotot, who developed teaching
methods for illiterate parents to teach their children how to read.[^40]
Rancière proposes that the teacher can inhabit the position of a
non-expert. The non-expert empowers the student in ways that the 'master
explicator' cannot. An authoritative teacher figure will always remind
the student of what they do not know, that they will never be able to
know as much as their teacher. Philosopher and educator, Paulo Freire,
referred to this transactional relation between the teacher (the one who
transmits knowledge) and the student (the one who receives knowledge and
who did not possess this knowledge before), as a \'banking model' of
education, which \"transforms students into receiving objects. The
\'banking model' of education is an \"approach to learning that is
rooted in the notion that all students need to do is consume information
fed to them by a professor and be able to memorize and store it.\"[^41]

The figure of the \'amateur\', as it is sometimes appears in the context
of H&D, inhabits modes of teaching and learning at once. Yet, I started
to question if sustaining assumed dichotomies between \'specialist\' and
\'amateur\', particularly in articulating the role and functioning of
experienced self-organized collectives such as H&D, might risk
downplaying socio-economic implications. The notion of the \'amateur\'
has a problematic history of appropriation in the context of graphic
design. Designer and researcher Ruben Pater wrote in his book *CAPS
LOCK* (2021) about \"how professional standards came into being and how
they led to some people being paid and finding recognition for their
graphic design work and some not.\"[^42] The tendency of so-called
professional graphic designers to turn towards \'amateur\',
\'vernacular\' or \'anti\' design is indicative of a certain
extractivist tendency in designers to \' turn towards what is
\'low-brow.\' Pater, therefore, prefers to refer to such practices as
unpaid design practices rather than amateur practices.

The expert-amateur dichotomy and its relation to the divide between paid
and unpaid labor also relates to the way in which work tends to be
implicitly \'devalued\' in the context of the H&D collective, by placing
what we do into the scope of fun \'not-too-serious\' experimentation.
Simultaneously, H&D takes part in the Dutch cultural landscape. H&D's
activities are funded by the Dutch Creative Industry Funds. Furthermore,
H&D is frequently invited to host workshops at art and design schools,
academic symposia and art, design and technology festivals. Thus H&D
participates in shaping a certain learning economy that leverages
short-term learning formats. The relationships between those involved in
H&D are loose. There are no presupposed obligations or dependencies.
Whether it be the co-workshoppers we meet, the tools, technologies and
methods we learn about, minor commitments and \'not-too-serious\'
experimentation are a fuel for collective practices such as H&D. By
organizing, hosting and attending many of the short-lived,
self-organized activities---including designing ad hoc publications,
embracing chaotic organization styles---ignorance (to use Ranciére's
term) becomes a \'professional\' collective skill that is practiced (and
funded).

**Unknown outcomes**

In *The Experimenters Chance and Design at Black Mountain College*
(2015),[^43] the art historian Eva Días discusses how the concept of
contingency or letting go of control in a design process, was perceived,
practiced and taught at the Black Mountain College. Black Mountain
College (BMC) was an art and design school that existed from 1933 until
1957 in North Carolina, and was known for its interdisciplinary and
experimental approach to art and design education. BMC built upon John
Dewey\'s principles of experience-based education. At BMC they practiced
holistic, non-hierarchical methodologies that attempted to decrease
distances between students and educators, but also the distance between
daily life and the production of design and art. Students were required
to participate in farming work, construction projects, had kitchen
duties and were involved in decision-making at various levels of the
institution. BMC was about learning to design from *within* rather than
*for* a social context.

The interest in contingency as part of design and art production at BMC
was described by Días as arising from the desire to break with routines,
setting into motion a process of defamiliarization with what one has
become used to, such as one\'s ways of looking at things, one's skills,
or thinking patterns. At BMC John Cage staged unrehearsed performances
and initiated improvisation workshops to break with the expected (Chance
Protocol). In Días\' account on the different approaches and motivation
for turning toward the unexpected at BMC, they all had rather distinct
ideas and expectations regarding the topic of the unforeseen, yet they
shared \"the impulse to change and control future conditions, moving
toward unforeseen experiences as quest toward new, more adequate, and
politically progressive and inclusive understanding of the world.\"[^44]

The protagonists in Eva Días\' book,[^45] apparently argued over degrees
of contingency during their time at BMC. However, according to Días,
they shared the belief that experimentation in art and design education,
welcoming chance and the unexpected, would be \"a means to think about
social stakes of form in a collaborative, interdisciplinary fashion, and
to rework outmoded, routinized production that led to repetition and
stagnation.\"[^46]

As designers, we set conditions, protocols, we leave parts of the
process up to chance in order to be surprised by the outcome and learn
to embrace the unexpected as part of a design process. Contingency can
be achieved through a variety of strategies that involve including
*others* in the design process---other people, other tools, other
materials, and other conditions. In collective practices, there are
subtle and yet significant differences in the meaning and expression of
the unknown that seem to be intertwined. On the one hand, the activity
of playful experimentation enables turning towards the unexpected with
curiosity, a certain openness towards the possibility of failure. On the
other hand, this openness also reflects a more general condition, that
is, a form of not-knowing that derives from uncertainty and instability
of working and living conditions.

The concept of contingency in the context of BMC (through Días\'
analysis), the interest in working with the unknown as a design
principle, was also related to a larger (social, economic, political)
context that necessitated breaking with routine perspectives and
practices. The motive for embracing chance was related to an urgent need
to reimagine and exercise other modes of living and working together.
The introduction of contingency as a design principle exceeded its
purpose which was to establish a method for producing design products
differently. It was part of articulating and exercising other collective
imaginaries for working and living together.

H&D is sometimes approached as if it were a design agency, or web
development office, which is to some degree understandable as some
projects that evolve from H&D look closely at what a design studio may
produce. Yet there is a difference, which has to do with a certain level
of unpredictability that exceeds the general acceptance of what can be
left up to chance. When people approach us with invitations to design
books or websites, they seem to be drawn to the experimental character
of what we do. Yet I noticed there is a threshold to what is generally
accepted as \'experimental\'. In introducing the requirement for
somewhat concrete outcomes, in the finite/final understanding of the
word \'outcome\', collaborators can (unknowingly) introduce other forms
of responsibility and attachment, than the collective is attuned to.

To recap: In this section I paid attention to subtle yet significant
differences in the meanings and functions of what is *not* familiar, in
relation to design and collectivity. Self-organized workshops offer
occasions for experimenting with different tools, in a different
context, with different people and may bring about other collective
imaginaries around design practice---possibilities for rethinking the
manner in which designers affiliate with certain tools and build
communities around other kinds of tool-building and use. The \'amateur\'
approach in such contexts may offer the opportunity to escape pressures
and the confines of specialized design work. However, differentiating
such short-lived socio-material experiments as \'not-too-serious\' and
\'not professional\', risks obscuring the implications of such
collective practices in relation to the environments and conditions they
are working within.

Approaching the \'we\' in collective practice

In previous sections the question arose, how can collective conditions
be negotiated when principles of unresolvedness, inefficiency, and chaos
move from being just spontaneous occurrences to becoming stabilized
modes of operation? Collectives also take part in shaping the
socio-material conducts of the environments they interact with, while
moving through different spheres of knowledge, disciplines, informal as
well as institutional learning environments. Taking the aforementioned
example of building experimental publishing tools and making
experimental publications in the context of H&D, the collective aspect
of such a practice cannot be explained solely through a designed
object---the publication itself. To articulate the meaning of such an
object, one has to shift the focus towards the manifold of people,
things, environments and practices this object has assembled throughout
the process of its making. The question that arises is how to approach
and account for the \'we\' in collective practice, if it is in a
constant state of change.

The struggle I experience with designing *for* collectives is similar to
the challenge of writing *about* collectives. At the beginning of my
research trajectory, I tried to write without really knowing who I was
writing for and from which perspective I was writing. In retrospect, I
recognize there were various hesitations at play, which I have not
necessarily resolved but I have found ways to make sense of and
negotiate. Considering that my research involves many actors and
\'actants\', with whom I have had both personal and professional
relationships, one of my concerns was that I would speak on behalf of
others. That is, claiming a position that is not mine, that I can only
partially understand and run the risk of misrepresenting. How to account
for and make visible the many voices and perspectives that have informed
this research project?

As collectivity is never inert, but rather in constant process, it is
difficult to document its characteristics in ways that translate
meaningfully across contexts. I am usually suspicious of enthusiastic
narratives and photo slideshows of workshop situations, which tend to
convey only one message: \"We had a great time. You had to be there!\"
However interesting collectivity looks in these pictures, the actual
experience is often quite different. I have therefore been on the
look-out for *other* forms and formats of articulating collectivity that
are not necessarily more truthful but perhaps more useful. I relate this
to Lauren Berlant who wrote: \"Form is not only a wish for a refuge, a
cushion, it is also social, an exposure, a mediation, and a launching
pad in relation to which beings can find each other to figure out how to
live in a movement that takes energy from the term "movements" political
resonance\".[^47]

I have been trying to work through these concerns by considering an
approach to designing and writing *with* collectivity, which starts by
paying attention to what is already there---the unresolved and
unpolished yet expressive materials and gestures, ephemeral how-tos and
readmes, workshop scripts, code snippets, spreadsheets and note taking
pads. I have been writing \'case stories\'---combinations of personal
anecdotes of everyday collective experiences interwoven with theoretical
analysis, which recalibrated my perspective on what is significant to
pay attention to. Writing anecdotes helped me to 'see' mundane aspects
of collectivity that turned out to be influential turning points. Such
everyday tales are often rendered invisible within existing frameworks
of analysis as defined by design\'s disciplinary imperatives. The case
stories became my approach to articulating collectivity and design in a
situated manner, from a perspective that I can account for to a certain
extent and that acknowledges the perspective from which I am writing as
necessarily partial. Due to its subjectivity and the attempt to locate
that subjectivity, these case stories offer a specific perspective as
opposed to a generic one.

Conclusion

In this chapter, I set the scene for the following chapters by
contextualizing my understanding, appreciation and frustration with
collective practice in relation to my education and work as a designer
and design educator. By considering various angles, I have argued that
collective design practice needs to be understood and articulated beyond
terms of purposefulness and togetherness. Self-organized collectives
bring people, tools, and technical infrastructure together and blur
disciplinary boundaries, distinctions between user and maker,
friendships and work relations. They therefore necessitate ongoing
(re)articulation of what it is we do and who we implicate in what we do.

Absolute definitions of collective design practices, depicting
collectives as antidotes to individualized design practice or
alternatives to design disciplines, obscure the manner in which
collectives are intertwined with multiple realities, economies and
timelines. Characteristics of collectives may be articulated only in
retrospect, and begin to solidify in the progression of collective
narratives, along with evolving collective vocabularies and
socio-technical conducts. While initially not perceived or planned as
such, evolving narratives of \'the collective\' may become what binds a
collective together. H&D is a group that became invested in exploring
alternative tools and other ways of learning and working together while
experimenting with unusual publishing methods. Simultaneously H&D is a
fragile ecosystem of self-employed practitioners who, due to their
unstable and diverging socio-material conditions, resort to short-lived,
semi-committed, chaotic ways of working together.

Collective imaginaries often occur in moments of uncertainty,
frustration or (dis)orientation. Yet, collectivity is not, and should
not be, proposed as a solution to the issues at stake. Rather, such
practices are symptomatic of unstable, unreliable social, technical, and
economic conditions. It is this double-bind of collectivity that
requires other perspectives and articulations that move beyond general,
positive and contained definitions. It is necessary to work against
stable pictures of collectivity, by paying critical attention to
inefficient and convoluted ways of designing / organizing / programming,
which, in my view, can also be subtle forms of resistance to the
acceptance and normalization of such unstable conditions.

I propose \'designing and writing *with* collectivity\', a mode of
reflection and practice which, throughout this dissertation, allows me
to critically approach articulations and materializations of collective
practice and to open up design perspectives and vocabulary toward the
relational, subtle, but consequential interplay of design and collective
practice. In the following chapters, I will continue to explore
collectivity-in-action. That is, the thresholds of fixation and
contingency in collective design practices, through weaving together
different formats, articulations, and visual gestures, and by switching
registers and timelines.

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[^1]: Lauren Berlant, \"The commons: Infrastructures for troubling
    times\*,\" in: *Environment and Planning D: Society and Space* 34,
    no 3, (2016): 393--419.

[^2]: According to Dictionary.com teamwork describes the \"cooperative
    or coordinated effort on the part of a group of persons acting
    together as a team or in the interests of a common cause\".\
    Merriam Webster defines teamwork as \"work done by several
    associates with each doing a part but all subordinating personal
    prominence to the efficiency of the whole\".

[^3]: Thomas J. Berghuis, \"Ruangrupa New Outlooks on Artist Collectives
    in Contemporary Art\" in *Mix & Stir. New Outlooks on Contemporary
    Art from Global Perspectives,* ed. Helen Westgeest, Kitty Zijlmans
    (Amsterdam: Valiz, 2021): 81-87.

[^4]: Janneke Wesseling, \"Art is Going Underground\", in *Mix & Stir.
    New Outlooks on Contemporary Art from Global Perspectives,* ed.
    Helen Westgeest, Kitty Zijlmans (Amsterdam: Valiz, 2021): 89-95.

[^5]: Feral Atlas
    [[https://feralatlas.org/]{.underline}](https://feralatlas.org/),
    Feral Trade
    [[https://feraltrade.org/]{.underline}](https://feraltrade.org/),
    last accessed January 2022.

[^6]: Kate Rich, \"Feral,\" in *Making Matters. A Vocabulary of
    Collective Arts\'*, ed. Florian Cramer, Janneke Wesseling
    (Amsterdam: Valiz, 2022): 273-277.

[^7]: ibid.

[^8]: Florian Cramer, Elaine W. Ho, \"Collective Organization\", in
    *Making Matters. A Vocabulary of Collective Arts*, Florian Cramer,
    Janneke Wesseling (eds.) (Amsterdam: Valiz, 2022): 67-75.

    Florian Cramer, Elaine W. Ho, \"Distribution,\" in *Making Matters.
    A Vocabulary of Collective Arts*, Florian Cramer, Janneke Wesseling
    (eds.) (Amsterdam: Valiz, 2022): 213-223.

[^9]: Sagmal is an expression used in German vernacular language. You
    use it before actually saying what you want to say. \"Tell me,
    \...\". It is a way to signal that the other person should get ready
    for what is about to come. Sagmal indicates determinacy and
    curiosity. What follows sagmal, is a prompt for the other person to
    respond. If someone says: \"Sagmal\...\", you know you will be
    invited to share your perspective on a matter. Another way of using
    sagmal, is without something added to it. \"Sagmal!\" can be an
    outburst -- a discreditation of what has been said or done.
    Something like: \"Pardon me?!\" Suggesting that what has been said
    maybe went a nudge too far and crossed a boundary of what is
    acceptable.

[^10]: Ruchama Noorda\'s PhD project \'℞eForm\' investigated the
    cultural, artistic and spiritual legacy of the late nineteenth- and
    early twentieth century Lebensreform (Life Reform) movement.
    Ruchama, Noorda, \"℞eForm.\" (PhD diss., Leiden University, 2015):
    120-167.

[^11]: During the time span of writing between 2021 and 2022, members of
    the H&D collective were Loes Bogers, André Fincato, Selby
    Gildemacher, James Bryan Graves, Anja Groten, Heerko van der Kooij,
    Juliette Lizotte, Karl Moubarak, Christine Kappé, Margarita Osipian
    and Pernilla Manjula Philip.

[^12]: The differentiation of \'design\' into these three categories
    refers to the work of Anne-Marie Willis on \'Ontological
    Designing\'. Anne-Marie Willis, \"Ontological Designing --- laying
    the ground,\" in *Design Philosophy Papers* 4, issue 2, (2006):
    69-92.

[^13]: Martha Scotford, \"Is There a Canon of Graphic Design History?,\"
    in: *Graphic Design: History in the Writing (1983--2011)*, De Bondt,
    S. and de Smet, C. (eds) (London: Occasional Papers, 2012): 226.

[^14]: ibid.

[^15]: Anja Kaiser, Rebecca Stephany, *Glossary for Undisciplined
    Design* (Leipzig: Spector Books, 2021).

[^16]: Paul A Rodgers, *The Concept of the Design Discipline*, in
    *Dialectic* I, issue 1, Winter 2017, accessed April 2022
    https://quod.lib.umich.edu/d/dialectic/14932326.0001.104?view=text;rgn=main

[^17]: KISD (Cologne International School of design) was the first
    university to establish 'Service Design' as a field in design
    education. "Systemic and holistic thinking, interdisciplinarity,
    facilitation and inspiration of cocreation processes, development of
    mock-ups and prototypes -- these core competencies of designers are
    applied to service organizations and processes, to interactions and
    to physical evidences."
    https://kisd.de/en/kisd/areas-of-expertise/service-design-en/

[^18]: Jan Boelen, Michael Kaethler (ed.) *Social matter, social design*
    (Amsterdam, Valiz, 2020).

[^19]: 'Open Design Now' ed. Bas van Abel, Roel Klaassen, Lucas Evers,
    Peter Troxler
    [[http://opendesignnow.org/]{.underline}](http://opendesignnow.org/),
    last accessed May 2022.

[^20]: Also referred to as Speculative Design by Dunne Raby. Accessible
    online at: https://www.critical.design/ "The term critical design
    was popularised by product/ interaction design team Anthony Dunne
    and Fiona Raby. Its central idea is to use design to speculate about
    the social, political and cultural implications of everyday objects,
    producing design works that question and challenge the status quo
    rather than reinforcing it."
    [[https://modesofcriticism.org/critical-everything/]{.underline}](https://modesofcriticism.org/critical-everything/),
    last accessed January 2022.

[^21]: Design thinking makes \"it seem as if complex problems and
    challenges were easily solvable and manageable" Dana Abdullah,
    \"Disciplinary Disobedience: A Border-Thinking Approach to Design"
    in: Claudia Mareis, Nina Paim (ed.) Design Struggles, (Amsterdam:
    Valiz, 2021): 231.

[^22]: Paul A Rodgers, *The Concept of the Design Discipline*, in:
    *Dialectic* I, issue 1, (Winter 2017).
    [[https://quod.lib.umich.edu/d/dialectic/14932326.0001.104?view=text;rgn=main]{.underline}](https://quod.lib.umich.edu/d/dialectic/14932326.0001.104?view=text;rgn=main),
    last accessed April 2022

[^23]: ibid.

[^24]: Dana Abdullah, \"Disciplinary Disobedience: A Border-Thinking
    Approach to Design" in: Claudia Mareis, Nina Paim (ed.) *Design
    Struggles*, (Amsterdam: Valiz, 2021): 228.

[^25]: Eleni Kalantidou and Tony Fry. *Design in the Borderlands,*
    (London, New York: Routledge, 2014).

[^26]: ibid.

[^27]: Bruno Latour, \"A Collective of Humans and Non-humans\" in:
    *Pandora\'s hope: essays on the reality of science studies*. 1999.
    Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press.

[^28]: Sara Ahmed., *Queer Phenomenology Orientations, Objects, Others.*
    (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006).

[^29]: Will Bradley, Mika Hannula, Cristina Ricupero, Superflex (eds.),
    *Self-organisation/Counter-Economic Strategies*, (Berlin: Sternberg
    Press, 2006): 5.

[^30]: Saskia Gras, \"Vrijplaats voor de kunsten: de Haagse Vrije
    Academie 1947-1982,\" PhD diss., Leiden University, 2017.

[^31]: According to Gras, pursuing research about an institution that
    regarded chaos as an educational principle and that resisted
    ordering principles in its own organizational practice, created some
    difficulties. Archives and documentation were hard to retrieve.
    Saskia Gras, \"Vrijplaats voor de kunsten: de Haagse Vrije Academie
    1947-1982,\" PhD diss., Leiden University, 2017.

[^32]: Jo Freeman 'The Tyranny of Structurelessness', first published in
    1970, found in: \'Collective Conditions\', Constant Association for
    Art and Media, 2019.

[^33]: W. Bradley, M. Hannuia, C. Ricupero, Superflex (ed).
    *Self-Organisation. Counter-Economic Strategies* (Berlin: Sternberg,
    2008).

[^34]: Raqs Media Collective, \"Nautonomat Operating Manual. A Draft
    Design for a Collective Space of \'Nautonomy\' for Artists and their
    Friends,\" in: N. Dockx, P. Gielen (ed), *Mobile Autonomy. Exercises
    in Artist\' Self-organization* (Amsterdam: Valiz: 2015).

[^35]: Bruno Latour, \"\'What's the Story?\' Organising as a mode of
    existence\" in: Passoth, Jan-H., Birgit Peuker and Michael
    Schillmeier (2011) *Agency without Actors? New Approaches to
    Collective Action. (*London: Routledge, 2011).

[^36]: Joost Grootens, \"Blind Maps and Blue Dots. The Blurring of the
    Producer-User Divide in the Production of Visual Information,\" PhD
    diss., Leiden University, 2021.

[^37]: Sivam Krish, \"A practical generative design method,\" in:
    *Computer-Aided Design* 43, issue 1, (January 2011): 88-100.

[^38]: Grootens described such \'amateur maps\' as *visibilization*
    rather than *visualizations.* Joost Grootens, \"Blind Maps and Blue
    Dots. The Blurring of the Producer-User Divide in the Production of
    Visual Information,\" PhD diss., Leiden University, 2021.

[^39]: \"Code text and text-to-speech\" workshop facilitated by An
    Mertens and Michael Murtaugh,
    [[https://hackersanddesigners.nl/s/Summer_Academy_2015/p/Code_text_and_text-to-speech]{.underline}](https://hackersanddesigners.nl/s/Summer_Academy_2015/p/Code_text_and_text-to-speech),
    last accessed May 2022.

[^40]: Jacques Rancière, *The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in
    Intellectual Emancipation*. (Stanford, Calif: Stanford University
    Press, 1991).

[^41]: bell hooks, \"Engaged Pedagogy,\" in *Teaching to Transgress*
    (New York London: Routledge, 1994): 14.

[^42]: In his reflection on the notion of the \'amateur\' Pater draws on
    designer and researcher Sasha Costanza-Chock. Ruben Pater, *CAPS
    LOCK* (Amsterdam: Valiz, 2021): 317.

[^43]: Eva Días, *The Experimenters. Chance and Design at Black Mountain
    College*, (The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, London, 2015).

[^44]: ibid.

[^45]: Eva Días focuses on the Black Mountain College artists Josef
    Albers, John Cage, Buckminster Fuller in: Eva Días, *The
    Experimenters. Chance and Design at Black Mountain College*, (The
    University of Chicago Press, Chicago, London, 2015).

[^46]: ibid.

[^47]: Lauren Berlant, \"The commons: Infrastructures for troubling
    times\*,\" *Environment and Planning D: Society and Space* 34, no. 3
    (2016): 393--419.