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== Conclusion ==

I began this dissertation by claiming that many design theories are
still too attached to, and therefore insufficiently question, the notion
of a \'purposeful\' relation between design and collectivity. As I have
explained in the first chapter \'Design & Collectivity\', it is often
during moments of crisis and disorientation when desires for
collectivity are articulated. Designers and design theorists are calling
for collective approaches as a form of disciplinary disobedience,[^1] to
counteract permanent insecurity,[^2] and to redesign economies and
interdependencies.[^3] Collectivity is proposed an organizing principle
that embraces care[^4] and resists exploitative forms of life.[^5]

However, these ongoing calls for collectivity within the field of design
do not so often address how exactly this structure shift might occur?
*How* precisely is collective design put into practice? My thesis has
focused throughout on the \'how\' of collective design, and to some
extent, this dissertation is a counter-proposition to the notion of a
\'purposeful\' relationship between design and collectivity. In this
concluding chapter I will summarize and reflect on the findings of my
thesis, which were initiated and directed by my central question: How to
design *for* and *with* collectivity*?* To gain a deeper understanding
of the relationship between design and collective practice, I have
discussed the various ways in which collectivity and design are
understood, articulated and practiced in the context of the Hackers &
Designers collective. My analysis of different in-practice examples
demonstrates how collective design processes can be conceived of and put
into practice in a manner that is distributed over people, objects,
conditions and timelines.

While the desire for collectivity often occurs during moments of
uncertainty, frustration or (dis)orientation, I argue that collectives
are not and should not be framed as a panacea to the issues at stake.
Collectives are often (rhetorically) used as stand-ins for what is not
functioning or cannot be immediately addressed. My argument is that
collective practices should also be considered a result of and a reason
for, unstable, unreliable social, technical, and economic conditions.
Collective practices are fragile ecosystems that operate on the basis of
a semi-committed engagement on the part of practitioners who are all,
individually and collectively, trying to uphold a balance between their
diverging socio-material conditions. Thus, collective practice, in the
way it is problematized in this thesis, is not fully deliberate, at
least not in the same way as for instance \'teamwork\', \'the commons\',
or \'cooperativism\', are purposeful organizational frameworks for
living, working or being together. Collective design processes, as
discussed here, take part in and are a result of particular (often
fragile) socio-economic, socio-technical conditions that pervade and
shape the ways collectives function. They also signify the formats and
conducts they resort to, such as short-lived workshops and chaotic ways
of working and being together. The fragmentation of social and work
relations is as much a characteristic of collective practice as the
effort to sustain long-term relationships. As fragmented and permeable
configurations, collectives are therefore not enclosed entities. They
take shape in response to the various contexts within which they travel,
and in turn are implicated in such contexts.

To clarify, I am not proposing a turn away from collective practice, nor
am I disregarding the efforts and accomplishments of the many
collectives that have inspired me to engage with and write about the
relationship between design and collectivity. The ubiquity of
collectives are indicative of our times. They can be incredibly
inventive, critical and reflective in the ways they manage to organize
themselves and others, despite their often sparse resources (i.e.,
little time, money and space) while dealing with unstable, unclear and
uncertain conditions. On the one hand, this inventiveness plays into the
unstable condition of diverging socio-economic realities, while on the
other hand, collectives simultaneously develop formats and practices
that resist fragmentation and sustain continuity. A workshop's
instantiation is not simply a single instance of gathering, but is
rather a component of an expansive, distributed and iterative process of
building a tool or making a publication.

Nonetheless, the double bind of collectivity requires critical attention
and articulation that moves beyond general, positive and container
definitions. This dissertation has examined this double-bind throughout.
I propose (and have put into practice throughout my thesis) actively
working against the stable and fetishizing image of collective
practices, instead paying critical attention to the inefficient and
convoluted ways of organizing, designing and programming. The refusal of
efficiency, usefulness and finality also carries potential for subtle
but effective forms of resistance against a general acceptance and
normalization of such unstable, precarious times and working conditions.

I have proposed and contextualized several subtle tactics throughout
this thesis; ways that collective design processes critically negotiate
socio-material conditions, which point towards a (desirable) future for
collective practices. Such tactics are not necessarily deliberate. They
evolve within and are responsive to specific collisions of people,
tools, contexts and should therefore not be read as recipes but as an
invitation to others to consider their meaning within the
site/context-specificity of their respective collective environments,
perhaps inventing their own maneuvers.

=== Making oneself understood through collective design practice ===

Throughout the various chapters of this dissertation, I have paid
sustained attention to the different manners in which collective design
processes assemble people, tools, infrastructure and offer occasions for
those involved to make themselves understood---for instance in workshop
situations or through the collective process of imagining and making a
Feminist Search Tool.

Workshops, as peculiar temporary spaces, require a certain openness and
flexibility in order to attune to their contingent socio-material
dynamics. The divergence between practitioner's ways of doing and making
becomes itself a condition that requires attention and explication of
what usually goes without saying (i.e. skilled practice).[^6] These
workshops are occasions for trying and testing articulations of other
practices, experimenting with making oneself understood and
understanding the *other* through different registers; verbal,
aesthetic, technical, methodical utterances.

I have also proposed the format of the \'workshop script\' as well as a
\'workshop about workshops.\' Both explicate and interrogate the
otherwise ambiguous format of the workshop as it has become
unquestionably accepted in a manifold of contexts, crossing boundaries
between art and activism, between different disciplines and
institutions, between commercial and educational contexts. A \'meta\'
workshop about workshops opened up the workshop as a format to be
questioned and unleashed a process of collectively reimagining and
reiterating workshop propositions and methods within the very context
the workshops would take place. Participants were workshop hosts and
vice versa and could together articulate and put into practice a
desirable, context-sensitive workshop atmosphere that worked against
fashionable workshop rhetoric (rapid, sprint, agile, marathon), which
insinuate high-velocity, hyper-efficient and result-oriented production.

The chapter \'Tool-building\' discusses the collective tool-making
project \'Feminist Search Tools\' (FST), a fragmented and non-conclusive
process, marked by the different (some rather precarious) socio-economic
realities of those participating. As such, it required *other* ways of
working together that resist linearity and teleological understandings
of the design process. Through the slow and fragmented making process,
the \'tool\' along with its meaning and actualization, was questioned
constantly, conceptually, technically, ethically, though not necessarily
conclusively. Personal desires, frustrations, observations and issues
were expressed throughout the process of imagining and making a tool.
Various aspects of the tool-in-the-making, including technical problems,
discomforts, personal hopes and desires for it to become \'useful\',
were repeated and rehearsed in the different contexts and at a pace that
included all participants, regardless of whether they would be able to
attend every workshop and meeting.

=== Conscious inefficiency ===

\'Slow collective processing\' is what I call the process of narrating
and testing the FST through various workshops, meetups, in various
contexts and different constellations. Within this non-conclusive
process, the same issues were revisited repeatedly. Drawing on Sara
Ahmed\'s exploration of the concept of \'use\' and the metaphysical
meaning of \'tool\' as developed by Graham Harman, Bruno Latour and
Karen Barad, I argue that the inefficiency of such a process can be
generative and inventive in and of itself. It can emphasize
other-than-utilitarian relationships to tools, as well as various
context-specific criteria and articulations for usefulness or usability
of such tools, which I have summarized with the phrase
\'broken-tool-in-action\'. This approach which I call \'conscious
inefficiency\' is explored throughout the various chapters and is
distilled here in this concluding chapter as yet another subtle tactic
for collective design practices to critically and inventively negotiate
their specific socio-material conditions. For instance, the lens of
\'conscious inefficiency\' highlights the resourceful and thoughtful
manner in which collective practices connect different people,
environments, tools and technical infrastructure.

The chapter \'Platform-design issues\' discusses different collective
experiments in \'platform-making\'. For instance *ChattPub,* (an
experimental publishing platform) could be regarded as inefficient and
convoluted if considered a mere design software. Yet as I have argued,
such self-made platforms can become inherently part of a collective\'s
functioning. As part of ongoing collective actualization, collective
platform-design processes bring about contextual and critical
socio-technical conducts and articulations, which in turn are
significant for their \'functioning\'. As such, collective
platform-design experiments resist and readjust generalizing perceptions
of what is inevitable and what is useful.

=== Leaning into friction: Problematization as experimentation ===

Throughout the various chapters I have recurrently referred to the
writing of feminist scholar and physicist Karen Barad. Barad wrote in
*Meeting the Universe Halfway*: \"the point is not merely that knowledge
practices have material consequences but that practices of knowing are
specific material engagements that participate in (re)configuring the
world. Which practices we enact matter--in both senses of the
word.\"[^7] Technical objects, as they are conceptualized and
materialized in and through collective practice, *matter*. They are not
alternatives for \'seamless\' proprietary tools, or \'easy-to-use\'
commercial platforms. They are also not merely speculative or
illustrative. The practical and experimental approach to conceptualizing
and designing tools and platforms *differently* matters in material
ways. Such experiments enable collectives to concretely and
imaginatively test out and put into practice other socio-technical
relationships.

I have argued that self-made platforms, as they are imagined and
materialized in and through collective practice, are somewhat
unreliable, unresolved and may create discomfort. Simultaneously, they
put into practice *other* possible platform-design scenarios. Drawing on
Celia Lury and Isabelle Stengers work on problematization[^8] and
problem spaces[^9] I argued that such platform-design experiments are
remarkable in the way they can sustain a collective awareness of
platforms as potentially \'problematic\' from the get-go. Those who are
imagining, building and using such platforms, can develop a critical
consciousness of their potential failures, and together learn to lean
into their frictions. In my view, such an approach differentiates a
collective design processes as theorized in this dissertation from, for
instance, participatory design, adversarial,[^10] or contestational
design[^11] or from critical/speculative design.[^12] I argue that
collective platform-design processes imagine and put into practice
*other* possible ways of designing and working together with and through
technical objects that are neither utilitarian/solution-driven nor
antagonizing.

=== Collective vocabularies: Invented words and ambiguous concepts ===

[Made-up terminology]{.underline}

In the chapter \"Platform-design issues\" I refer to the word
\'platframe\', a term made-up during a collective process of designing
and building a digital environment for collaboration, and how its
recurrent use contributed to sustaining a collective awareness and
questionability of the limits and possibilities of the
platform-in-the-making. Such word inventions underline how collectives
are able to express socio-technical relationships as problematic on the
one hand, and on the other, build and sustain a somewhat supportive
relationship with the evolving technical object and with each other.

Collective practices often develop their own vocabulary. The invented
term \'nautonomy\' by Raqs Media Collective[^13] is a good example,
which they define as

> \"more than autonomy. It is nautical, voyaging and mobile. Nautonomy
> re-articulates and re-founds the \'self-organizing\' principle
> inherent in what is generally understood when considering the idea of
> autonomy, while recognizing that the entity mistakenly called \'self\'
> is actually more precisely an unbounded constellation of persons,
> organisms and energies that is defined by its capacity to be a voyager
> in contact with a moving world.\"[^14]

Constant Association for Art and Media[^15] also work with invented
terminology.[^16] Words such as \'ex-titutions', \'DiVersions\' and
'cqrrelations', are reminiscent of and relate to familiar terms.[^17]
Yet, they are invented when familiar terminology does not fully suffice
or encompass all the attributes and idiosyncrasies of continuously
evolving collective practices. Alternative dictionaries, lexicons,
\'contradictionaries\'[^18] attend to these invented collective
vocabularies. The book *Making Matters -- A Vocabulary of Collective
Arts* is an example of such a repository, which this research has
contributed to and benefited from.[^19]

[Piggybacking on ambiguous concepts]{.underline}

In the chapter \'workshop production\' I propose that concepts such as
\'workshop\', \'tool\' and \'platform\' blend seamlessly into the
trajectories of contemporary precarious cultural workers and have also
become part of a common vocabulary around collective practices. Yet
there is a risk of obscuring the implications of collective practices
that come with ambiguous terminology and flexible definitions.
Nevertheless, I persist with \'workshop\', \'tool\' and \'platform\' and
throughout the various chapters, I disentangle and disambiguate their
meaning and functioning for collective practice. I argue that these
ambiguous concepts and formats are indicative of the inventiveness of
collectives. They are equally loose and stable enough for collectives to
interact with different contexts and to keep those involved connected,
while simultaneously defining and redefining what that means. Persisting
with \'workshop\', \'tool\' and \'platform\' to articulate and practice
collectivity means to always take into account the fact that such
concepts and formats require critical attention. For instance, it is my
view that organizing workshops responsibly requires context-specific
interrogation of how a workshop should be actualized and its
implications for the specific context in the long-term. This question
cannot be answered in general terms. Thus, it must be revisited again
and again and should be answered in accordance with the particular
composition of people, resources, tools, infrastructures and
environments involved.

=== Designing for and with collectivity ===

As I have argued, the relationships between design and collectivity
cannot be presupposed as relationships of utility. Therefore, it
requires relational approaches for articulating collective design
practice. Designing *with* collectivity proposes a relationship between
design and collective practice that is reciprocal and mutually
entangled, and differentiates collective practice from other modes of
working and designing together.

==== Designing with others ====

Designing *with* collectivity means to be involved in design processes
that are distributed over various people, objects, diverging timelines
and conditions. It is a process, not a method or a goal, in the sense
that a participatory design process would follow a goal by involving
others, i.e., to improve design processes or outcomes. Designing with
collectivity is not about designing better. It is an imaginative as well
as concrete material process of being and doing things together
differently from how it would be usually done. It is about imagining and
putting into practice \'terms of transition\', forging collective
imaginaries for \"managing the meanwhile within damaged life\'s
perdurance.\"[^20]

==== Designing for continuity ====

Gaining a deeper understanding of the relationship between design and
collectivity goes hand in hand with learning to design *with*
collectivity---that is, attuning to collectives\' unpredictabilities. As
fragile and unreliable ecosystems, collectives are reflective of our
unstable times, and as such, also offer possibilities for those involved
to develop subtle tactics to address and counteract technical and
economic uncertainties, flexibilization and fragmentation of work and
life. Designing *for* collectivity is indicative of the effort to keep
those involved connected, while upholding critical, ethical and
sustainable ways of working and being together.

Collective practices develop context-specific social and technical
conduct, which I have also compared to the manner in which workshop
instructors take care to maintain their workshop spaces, in terms of
both facilities and hospitality. While formats and utterances of
collective practice seem dispersed and never resolved, they are
significant for their continuity and long-term commitments. As I have
demonstrated throughout with reference to various examples, designing
for and with collectivity is an artful balancing act, which cannot be
prescribed as a design method but contributes to the larger field and
discourse of design, precisely through its requirement of continuous
practice and problematization. In persisting with this sustained effort,
collective design practices offer the opportunity to readjust and
rearticulate generalizing perspectives to relational, context-sensitive
and iterative approaches to designing with others.

=== Bibliography ===

Abdullah, Danah, \"Disciplinary Disobedience. A Border-Thinking Approach
to Design.\" *Design Struggles* edited by Nina Paim and Claudia Mareis.
Amsterdam: Valiz, 2020, 227-238.

Barad, Karen. *Meeting the Universe Halfway. Quantum Physics and the
Entanglement of Matter and Meaning*. Durhan, London: Duke University
Press, 2007.

Brave New Alps, \"Precarity Pilot,\" 2015,
https://modesofcriticism.org/precarity-pilot/.

Cramer, Florian and Janneke Wesseling (eds.). *Making Matters. A
Vocabulary for Collective Arts.* Amsterdam: Valiz, 2022.

Davis, Cherry-Ann and Nina Paim (Complaint Collective). \"Does Design
Care?\" 2021, https://futuress.org/magazine/does-design-care/.

DiSalvo, Carl. *Adversarial Design*. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT
Press, 2012.

Escobar, Arturo. \"Design for the Pluriverse.\" Durham and London: Duke
University Press, 2018.

Hirsch, Tad. \"Contestational Design: Innovation for Political
Activism.\" PhD diss., MIT, 2008.

Lovink, Geert. \"Precarious by Design.\" Silvio Lorusso. e*veryone is an
entrepreneur. nobody is safe.* Eindhoven: Onomatopee, 2019.

Lury, Celia. *Problem Spaces. How and Why Methodology Matters*.
Cambridge: Polity Press, 2021.

Mugrefya, Élodie and Femke Snelting. \"DiVersions. An Introduction.\"
*DIVERSIONS / DIVERSIONS / DIVERSIES*, (2020),
https://diversions.constantvzw.org/wiki/index.php?title=Introduction#introduction

Raqs Media Collective. \"Nautonomat Operating Manual. A Draft Design for
A Collective Space of \'Nautonomy\' for Artists and their Friends.\"
*Mobile Autonomy. Exercises in Artists\' Self-organization edited by
Nico Dockx & Pascal Gielen*, Amsterdam: Valiz, 2015.

Snelting, Femke. \"Undisciplined.\" Janneke Wesseling & Florian Cramer
(ed.) *Making Matters. A Vocabulary of Collective Arts,* Amsterdam:
Valiz, 2022.

Stengers, Isabelle. *In Catastrophic Times.* London: Open Humanities
Press, 2015.

Stengers, Isabelle. \"Putting Problematization to the Test of Our
Present.\" *Theory, Culture & Society* 38, no. 2 (2021): 71--92.

Suchman, Lucy \"Configuration.\" *Inventive Methods* edited by Celia
Lury; Nina Wakeford. London; New York: Routledge, Taylor & Francis
Group, 2014.

[^1]: \"I propose the decolonial concept of border-thinking within
design as a method of disciplinary disobedience for moving design
towards more collective approaches.\" Danah Abdullah, \"Disciplinary
Disobedience. A Border-Thinking Approach to Design,\" in: Nina Paim
and Claudia Mareis \"Design Struggles\" (Amsterdam: Valiz, 2020):
228.

[^2]: \"Yet, despite all the flexibility and ever-changing styles and
modes of production, what lacks is the collective design of a
subjectivity that would overcome permanent insecurity\" Geert
Lovink, foreword in Silvio Lorusso. *everyone is an entrepreneur.
nobody is safe.* (Eindhoven: Onomatopee, 2019): 12.

[^3]: \"It becomes possible to collectively redesign economies and
interdependencies in ways that defy, resist and/or exit precarising
ways of organising and designing.\" Brave New Alps, \"Precarity
Pilot\", 2015,
[[https://modesofcriticism.org/precarity-pilot/]{.underline}](https://modesofcriticism.org/precarity-pilot/),
last accessed May 2022.

[^4]: \"To embrace care as an organizing principle in every part of
life, we must do so collectively.\" Complaint Collective, \"Does
Design Care?\" Cherry-Ann Davis and Nina Paim, 2021,
[[https://futuress.org/magazine/does-design-care/]{.underline}](https://futuress.org/magazine/does-design-care/),
last accessed May 2022.

[^5]: \"The collective determination toward transitions, broadly
understood, may be seen as a response to the urge for innovation and
the creation of new, nonexploitative forms of life, out of the
dreams, desires, and struggles of so many groups and peoples
worldwide.\" Arturo Escobar, *Design for the Pluriverse* (Durham and
London: Duke University Press, 2018): 7.

[^6]: Isabelle Stengers wrote: \"It should be unnecessary to emphasize
that making divergences present and important has nothing to do with
respect for differences of opinion, it must be said. It is the
situation that, via the divergent knowledges it activates, gains the
power to cause those who gather around it to think and hesitate
together.\"

Isabelle Stengers, *In Catastrophic Times* (London: Open Humanities
Press, 2015): 143.

[^7]: Karen Barad, *Meeting the Universe Halfway. Quantum Physics and
the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning* (Durhan, London: Duke
University Press, 2007): 91.

[^8]: Isabelle Stengers \"Putting Problematization to the Test of Our
Present,\" *Theory, Culture & Society* 38, no. 2 (2021): 71--92.

[^9]: Celia Lury \"Platforms and the Epistemic Infrastructure,\"
*Problem Spaces. How and Why Methodology Matters* (Cambridge: Polity
Press, 2021): 14.

[^10]: Carl DiSalvo, *Adversarial Design* (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT
Press, 2012).

[^11]: Tad Hirsch, \'Contestational Design: Innovation for Political
Activism,\' (PhD diss., Media Art and Sciences, MIT, 2008): 23.

[^12]: Anthony Dunne & Fiona Raby, \"CRITICAL DESIGN FAQ\"
[[http://dunneandraby.co.uk/content/bydandr/13/0]{.underline}](http://dunneandraby.co.uk/content/bydandr/13/0),
last accessed May 2022.

[^13]: Raqs Media Collective, \"Nautonomat Operating Manual. A Draft
Design for A Collective Space of \'Nautonomy\' for Artists and their
Friends,\" *Mobile Autonomy. Exercises in Artists\'
Self-organization* edited by Nico Dockx & Pascal Gielen (Amsterdam:
Valiz, 2015): 100.

[^14]: ibid.

[^15]: The activities and practices of Constant \"depart from feminisms,
copyleft, Free/Libre + Open Source\" and encompass for instance
programming, organizing exchanges and learning environments, making
performances, writing, publishing, making installations
[[https://constantvzw.org/site/]{.underline}](https://constantvzw.org/site/),
last accessed May 2022.

[^16]: Femke Snelting, \"Undisciplined,\" *Making Matters. A Vocabulary
of Collective Arts* (Amsterdam: Valiz, 2022): 300.

[^17]: \"With the neologism "DiVersions" we wanted to allude to the
possibility that technologies of \"versioning" might foreground
divergent histories,\" Élodie Mugrefya, Femke Snelting,
\"DiVersions. An Introduction,\" *DIVERSIONS / DIVERSIONS /
DIVERSIES*
[[https://diversions.constantvzw.org/wiki/index.php?title=Introduction#introduction]{.underline}](https://diversions.constantvzw.org/wiki/index.php?title=Introduction#introduction),
last accessed May 2022.

[^18]: Lucy Suchman, \"Configuration,\" I*nventive Methods* edited by
Celia Lury; Nina Wakeford (London; New York : Routledge, Taylor &
Francis Group, 2014): 48-60.

[^19]: Florian Cramer, J. Wesseling (ed), *Making Matters. A Vocabulary
for Collective Arts* (Amsterdam: Valiz, 2022).

[^20]: Lauren Berlant \"Infrastructures for Troubling Times,\"
*Environment and Planning D: Society and Space* 34, no. 3 (2016):
393--419.

Conclusion - Revision history