Workshop scripts in practice
The publication First, Then... Repeat. Workshop Scripts in Practice draws together self-published and unpublished workshop scripts that evolved in and around the collective ecosystem of Hackers & Designers (H&D).[1] H&D has been organizing workshops since 2013, and along the way has established social-technical affinities that are loose and stable, temporary and ongoing. We met and befriended many practitioners and sister organizations since, and got acquainted with manifold, peculiar pedagogical formats, and experimental approaches to working, learning, and being together. This publication derives from an enthusiasm for the various ways collective learning environments take shape. It grew out of a curiosity for the ways that such practices are shared across different localities, timelines, and experiences.
Situated somewhere between documentation and a call for action, the workshop scripts are companions to self-organized learning situations. They articulate and materialize aspects of such practice that cannot always easily be explained through existing frameworks. Contributions to the book document and reflect on self-organized learning situations that spontaneously assemble practitioners from various domains, diffusing disciplinary boundaries and blurring distinctions between learner and teacher, user and maker, product and process, friendships and work relations. They have in common that they seek affiliations beyond predetermined domains and bring together various vocabularies and methods all at once.
This publication addresses this challenge by drawing together workshop-based practices as a form of inquiry and by paying attention to the practice of (re)writing, (re)activating, documenting, and reflecting on “workshop scripts.” This is an attempt to discuss and show how workshops and workshop scripts shape—and in turn, are shaped by—the various environments they pass through. As a collection that holds various relational and iterative documents, it therefore cannot be considered a product or example of one specific kind of practice. The practices it draws together are site, context, and time specific, never complete, always ongoing, as are their various forms of expression.
To assist the reader, the contributions were organized into five clusters: Setting Conditions, Prompts, How-tos, Distributed Curricula, and Active Bibliographies. While the contributions are organized according to these clusters and appear in a linear order, they are also intertwined in multiple ways, and resist a linear narrative (forward-moving progressing, improving, innovating). Thus, readers are invited to be on the look out for other, multiple, and parallel connections and navigate the contributions idiosyncratically, non-linearly, in a zigzag, from back to front.
Find the publication online 🌐: firstthenrepeat.hackersanddesigners.nl. The printed publication 📚 is available via the H&D website.
As an exploration into unusual, non-proprietary, open-source, free and libre publishing tools and workflows the code can be found on the H&D Github.
Contributors
Åbäke, Julia Bee, Loes Bogers, Naomi Chambers, Qianxun Chen, Gerko Egert, Petra Eros, Feminist Health Care Research Group, Feminist Search Tools Working Group, fanfare, André Fincato, Gabriel Fontana, Sarah Garcin, Erin Gatz, Anja Groten, James Bryan Graves, Giselle Jhunjhnuwala, Olivia Jaques, Nienke Huitenga-Broeren, Angela Jerardi, Pernilla Manjula Philip, Brian Massumi, Katherine Moriwaki, Mio Kojima, Heerko van der Kooij, Siwar Kraytem, Juliette Lizotte, Karl Moubarak, Hanna Müller, Luke Murphy, Santiago Pinyol, Susan Ploetz, Juli Reinartz, Sandy Richter, Alice Strete, Social Muscle Club, Workshop Project, Stefanie Wuschitz, Xin Xin.
- Editor: Anja Groten
- Design: Anja Groten, Juliette Lizotte
- Development: Heerko van der Kooij, Maisa Imamović
- Copy-editing: Georgie Sinclair
- Proofreading: Loes Bogers
- Paper Inside: Rebello, 90 grs
- Paper Cover: Muskat Grijs, 290 grs
- Printing: Drukkerij RaddraaierSSP
- Binding: Swiss bound, with yellow open spine by AIGA Amsterdam
- Publisher: self-published by Hackers & Designers, www.hackersanddesigners.nl
- License: COLLECTIVE CONDITIONS FOR RE-USE (CC4r)
With the kind support of Stimuleringsfonds Creatieve Industrie
- ↑ H&D started as a workshop-based meetup series in Amsterdam in 2013. Since then, we have been organizing workshops—sometimes self-organized, sometimes by invitation. H&D workshops are informal and usually follow a hands-on and practical approach. Attendees mostly work at the intersection of technology, design, art, and education. Alongside organizing workshops, H&D produce online and offline publications, and build open-source tools and platforms.