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

   [[1]{.underline}](https://feralatlas.org/),
   Feral Trade
   [[2]{.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
   [[3]{.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."
   [[4]{.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).
   [[5]{.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,
   [[6]{.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.