FREE-Wiki

Presentation Poster designed by Workshop Project

wiki reflections

Workshop Project

Found Spaces: Incubating Under The Radar

Hello. We are Workshop Project. We formed in 2013 as a place to imagine what a pedagogical graphic design practice could be. We are for:

• The uncolonial: the marginal, unstructured, seemingly infertile found spaces in which our professional practice resides
• The noncanon: the texts/ voices / ideas inscribed in culture that emerge from inside, outside, beneath and all around
• Mapping the multi-, the poly-, the inter-, the proto-, the tele-, the trans-, the ne plus ultra
• The heterodoxy: the network, the infinite surface that conceals passages and wormholes that transit to unforeseen places
• We are here to share some reflections with you about the Workshop Project Wiki and the ideas it embodies. The Wiki is for:
• The authority of participation
• The dismantling of traditional hierarchies
• The aesthetics of access
• The heterodoxy

When we talk about a wiki, we are referring to free and open-source software that offers a central place for decentralized online collaboration. Wikis are open, extensible, customizable, and free of charge. There are many iterations of wiki software. MediaWiki is one of them with its most popular application being Wikipedia. The Workshop Project Wiki (WPW) uses DokuWiki—a wiki software that doesn't require a database. To edit and style content, wiki's use a specific syntax—wiki mark-up—which is comparable to mark-down. It is possible to create many articles/pages and add a diverse range of media. The WPW converges the DokuWiki software and the online collaborative real-time editor Etherpad. Each wiki article comes with a parallel Etherpad. The WPW embodies a non-static and flat hierarchy. Its authority comes from participation and constant change rather than concrete answers or solutions. It is process-based, expansive, and always being built and refined. It is always in a state of becoming.

When we talk about Workshop Project, we are referring to our search for a way to channel our love of critical design pedagogy into a form of professional design practice. Our practice has been built in pockets of found time between working our day jobs (mid-career teaching and administration) and raising small humans, in hardcore mom mode. These stolen pockets of time are to us similar to the suburban “found spaces” used by Gen X skateboarders when the skateparks closed—pools, drainage ditches, and culverts—“places not intended for skateboarding but nonetheless appropriated by skateboarders, and often on a temporary or semi-illegal basis.” A desire for inquiry-based, purpose-driven work pushed us out of mainstream professional design practice and into improvised and found spaces that were void of clients, vetted infrastructures, and all their rules. We continue to operate Workshop Project from a web of found spaces, with a network of collaborators, using janky platforms like the wikis, Mozilla Hubs, and other open-source alternatives to corporate platforms that offer a freestyle space for becoming.

Extolling the Virtues of Janky Technology

There is something about the cultural sidelining of middle-aged women—moms—that resonates with the marginal position of janky technology: functional and plain, post-ironic, never quite relevant, but incubating under the radar. Janky platforms of all types (open-source anything, wikis in particular) are kinda-sorta functional, fussy, kooky, idiosyncratic by design. They resist commodification and branding because of their “inefficiency”. To some extent wikis are unresolved and unyielding, and as a result they never become anything easily consumable. They require attention, practice, and a certain commitment to process. Wiki's allow opportunity and time for becoming without an intended purpose or application. As such, they are as subversive as they are conventional. They are free.

FREE Wiki

It seems appropriate that as mid-career educators, we should be extolling the virtues of janky technology. We watch with fatigue and ambivalence as New! Effective! Collaborative! Professional! technologies continue to roll by. Corporate technology has extended its stranglehold from graphic design practice to graphic design education. The structures and aesthetics programmed into Adobe Creative Suite fuel a tasteful visual homogeneity that allows it to dominate both professional standards and non-professional needs. Whether amateur or professional, everything that is made with these tools becomes part of an all-encompassing corporate branding campaign fueled by the commodification of “creativity.” As a discipline, we designers have internalized the aesthetics of our tools. In our younger days, these observations would have been followed by an anti-capitalist screed and a cry for resistance, a rejection of the corporate pigs. But today the anti-corporate tirades of our youth have been tempered by living through the absorption of the outside, the anti-, the counter- into the all-encompassing present.

As southern Californian (SoCal) Gen Xers we identify as the mall rats of design education. Our relationship to commerce and aesthetics was shaped by a megalopolis that offers a simultaneous experience of the urban and suburban. Strip malls. Pink box donut shops. Latchkey kids. Beaches. Housing developments too generic to gentrify. We browse discount stores and try on a platform shoe while backing away slowly from d-school. Open-source platforms speak to us because they don't cost much and because they are free. They aren’t aspirational or optimized. They are spaces of potential—where airwalking inside the industry of design education can happen. And our practice is invested in cultivating found spaces for like-minded educators to shred.

 

Nested in the margins of our days, the alchemical combination of ideology and material realities that formed Workshop Project also produced a number of outcomes, the most significant of which is the FREE Design Educators Workshop. If our initial focus was to incubate a pedagogical graphic design practice by writing it into being, FREE was built with the same methodology. The workshop is free of charge, eliminating financial barriers to participation wherever possible. It is publicized by word of mouth and funded by cobbling together multiple small institutional sources. The aesthetics of the workshop are directly connected to the context of their production: doing more with less with little regard for the conventions of corporate and academic design conferences. During the workshop, colleagues from different institutions gather to discuss and respond to a prompt about the future-now of design education, whose outcome is undetermined. We operate on platforms that are free and accessible to all, whether in person or remote. We occupy vacant institutional spaces—the culverts and empty pools of design education—thanks to the resourcefulness of friends and colleagues. We thrive on the inefficiency of the educational institution, whose spaces lie dormant in summer.

The Alchemy of Found Spaces

In 2018, as we began to materialize the first FREE workshop, it became clear that our financial and philosophical positions aligned with those of other practices and initiatives who have found spaces of resistance inside the global industry of design education.

Then we met Anja Groten and André Fincato who are part of the Amsterdam-based collective H&D. We found kindred spirits in Anja and André, who contributed the powerful tool of the Workshop Project Wiki to our practice. We reached out to Anja knowing that she would be in residence at Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles during FREE. We were curious about the possibility of collaborating on a website for the workshop, because everything needs a website. Anja introduced us to André and a found space opened up before us.

André and Anja brought their interests and agenda to the project. They had been developing a wiki as the backend for the Hackers & Designers website. After reading the prompt, they proposed a wiki as the website structure and a potential tool for the workshop. The site would be built with the integration of an etherpad, an open-source tool for collaborative writing. Unlike a wiki page, an etherpad can support simultaneous writing and editing by multiple users in real time. We understood the site’s various capabilities, but did not know how or if it would be used by the participants in an in-person context. We had some vague ideas about archiving work in process and making our efforts shareable with other educators. However, we did not anticipate the impact of the wiki’s two distinguishing characteristics: user editing via wiki mark-up language and simultaneous writing. With the introduction of the wiki, our expectations and assumptions about web-based tools began to unravel, and we could see new ways of working together. The Workshop Project Wiki shepherded collaboration amongst intergenerational colleagues with different levels of professional and technical expertise. Small teams of design educators were asked to produce outcomes of design education based on a speculative prompt. Work sessions were long and intensive. In order to edit pages on the wiki, all participants were required to use wiki mark-up language.

 

This distinct but familiar mark-up language became a common, accessible, non-intuitive technical language that participants (and hosts!) had to learn together, hunched over their laptops and looking over each other's shoulders. It was easy, but it took time. No one arrived knowing how to do it. The wiki was an equalizer, a hierarchy neutralizer. It transformed the participants into peers in the found space and time of the workshop. It was the technical equivalent of a dialect that mirrored a feeling of commonality amongst a small group of educators and students at different moments in their careers. It became a tool for experimenting with the craft of design pedagogy and investigating specific aspects of contemporary visual culture and their repercussions for design education.

The wiki also changed how we understood in-person collaboration. Because of the etherpad’s capability for simultaneous writing, the wiki played a critical role in sharing work and ideas in real time among multiple groups. It allowed for a kind of simultaneous viewing and commentary that, in physical space, would result in cacophony. Users were able to straddle the digital realm of discourse and the physical world of production.

Found Space is Process

The wiki, as a structure, privileges the group and that which is shared over the needs of an individual user. It requires users to learn its language, which becomes a commonly held lexicon. As with any other language, wiki mark-up carries with it an embedded set of priorities. Its approach to efficiency is reflected in a reduced palette of tools and options. There’s a lot you can do, but also a lot you can’t do, particularly if you’re a graphic designer accustomed to crafting intricate visual hierarchies and systems. Its visual language is equally reductive, but as the result of efficiency in coding and file size, not a stylistic choice. It favors a type of optimization that is eschewed by mainstream conventions of UI/UX design. It is designed to be economical, and shared among groups who have varying access to equipment and bandwidth. It is meant to be nimble and malleable, with aesthetics linked to the nature of its content.

The wiki is a powerful yet blunt instrument. Its formal limitations stimulate a return to inquiry and building content. It held the FREE workshop participants in process, resisting any outcomes that appeared “finished.” However, in return, it provided something concrete to gather around that structured and grounded big, abstract ideas. Participants came to the workshop with nothing and left with nothing. The “thing” that is made is the time together, the practicing and rehearsing of our craft as educators. The wiki is the empty pool, the place where the meta comes to the concrete to play.

This resistance to the protocol or the nomenclature of academic peer review, writing, conference participation, and public validation is at the heart of found spaces whose nature is reflection and iteration and process. Both the workshop and the wiki are not about outcomes, career advancement, or productivity in an academic or commercial sense. The wiki is not so simply the document of time spent making space on the inside for the educators themselves. Eventual refinement and development of ideas—if it happens—happens outside the wiki, in other spaces and platforms. The found space is a non-outcome in itself.

 

What do we do in the Shadows

We didn’t plan for a non-outcome. Just the opposite in fact. We wanted to legitimize our shadow practice, publish our work on a website, and be recognized by our peers for it. But the Workshop Project Wiki isn’t optimized for major, commercial search engines and, to some extent, resists distribution. As a context-specific artifact, it is pretty undecipherable to the general design education community (laughing). Because it is always editable by many individuals, its structure has grown in ways that are inconsistent and content-specific. Deciphering the pathways through the content requires an investment. Every time we sign in to it, we have to relearn it. It is all or nothing at all. The wiki breaks a lot. It goes dormant. It doesn’t summarize. It stops when the workshop is over. It’s skate or die. It is essential to being present at the workshop and then immediately unnecessary when the workshop is over.

This resistance to distribution and commodification drives us back to the ideas and the thinking. It’s our way of staying under the radar, in process and focused on an inquiry into our craft as educators. Doing something! with janky technology! Together! is a proto-antidote to the energy vampiric (but professional!) Zoom, Miro, and Milanote that defined design education during the pandemic and now define collaboration at large.

Found space is meant to be shared space. It is unbranded, non-proprietary, unstructured; it is free. On a practical level the wiki and its janky cousins function as something to gather around, a campfire, something to login to, something that precedes and marks the beginning of shared reflection. Their clunkiness, their simplicity are comforting foils to our previsualized, optimized, and shared visual culture.

Workshop Project is Yasmin Khan and Jessica Wexler, design educators and practitioners with over two decades of combined experience teaching, designing curricula and coordinating faculty within diverse public, private and for-profit institutions. Yasmin is Co-Director, Program in Graphic Design at California Institute of the Arts in Valencia, California. Jessica is the Chairperson of Undergraduate Communications Design at Pratt Institute in New York.