Bulletin 1 Note on Design
A Note on the design of this publication
Hackers & Designers’ publishing experiments intersect computer programming, art, and design, and involve the building of self-made, hacked, and reappropriated tools and technical infrastructures, which sometimes results in printed output, such as the one you are holding now.
Following open-source principles, the tool ecosystem that evolved around the design of this publication is documented and published on the H&D website[1] and git repository [2] under the CC4r license,[3] providing the possibility of continuation in other contexts, studying, critiquing, and repurposing.
We hope these small publications contribute to a growing community of designers who consider it relevant to rethink their tool-ecologies and building forth on the knowledge and practices of many designers and collectives that work with and contribute to open-source approaches to designing on and offline publications.[4]
Publishing the H&D bulletins is furthermore an attempt to research small printing presses, more specifically how experimental, open source, DIY publishing tools (often made by repurposing web technologies) and the at times, janky pdfs they produce, intersect with material realities of pre-press processes and different eco-conscious printing techniques.
The tool ecosystem includes: MediaWiki, Jinja templating, Pagedjs for the layout.
On accessibility
For this bulletin, we used syllable-based highlighting to create a dyslexia-friendly reading experience. This method provides visual cues that break down words into manageable syllables, assisting individuals with dyslexia in word recognition and segmentation. By doing this, we hope to improve accessibility, enhance the reading experience, and promote better comprehension for readers with dyslexia. To strike a balance between accuracy and efficiency, we implemented a heuristic method for syllable detection. The algorithm approximates the position of syllable boundaries by leveraging patterns of vowels and consonants. While it may not be perfect, we hope that this approach is effective enough of our use case.
- ↑ hackersanddesigners.nl/s/Tools.
- ↑ github.com/hackersanddesigners.
- ↑ constantvzw.org/wefts/cc4r.en.html.
- ↑ Collectives that inspire us in our design experiments are Varia, Constant Association for Art and Media, Open Source Publishing, the practices and knowledge deriving from educational contexts such as the student-led interdepartmental initiative PUB at the Sandberg Instituut Amsterdam or XPUB—a master programme of Experimental Publishing at Piet Zwart Institute, the digital and hybrid publishing research groups of the Institute of Network Cultures. Concretely, the technical infrastructure and workflow used to create this publication (wiki-to-pdf) is building on the code repositories of Martino Morandi (Constant Association for Art and Media) developed for the publication ‘Infrastructural Interactions’ edited by TITiPI (Helen V Pritchard, Femke Snelting) (gitlab.constantvzw.org/titipi/wiki-to-pdf), and Manetta Berends (Varia Collective) developed for the publication Volumetric Regimes edited by Possible Bodies (Jara Rocha, Femke Snelting), published under the CC4r license (git.vvvvvvaria.org/mb/volumetric-regimes-book).