“Collaboration can be so strong it forces hard boundaries. The boundaries can intentionally or unintentionally exclude the possibility to extend the collaboration. Potentially conflict can also occur at these borders”

For this years’ Transmediale Festival, the F/LOSS Manuals project took up the challenge to write, edit and publish a collaborative publication in 5 days while test [...]

In the train back from Stuttgart, I read Tools for Conviviality, a pamphlet by social philosopher Ivan Ilich (1973). A ‘convivial society’, he argues, is a society in which everyone can act autonomously, and this can be achieved through the design and use of ‘convivial tools’:
People feel joy, as opposed to mere pleasure, to [...]

The transformer (Marie Neurath) at work
Today a long awaited booklet arrived in the post: The transformer, principles of making Isotype charts written by Robin Kinross & Marie Neurath. It is inspiring in its modest but precise description of unorthodox working methods developed by philosopher, sociologist, and economist Otto Neurath and his associates. To produce ‘pictures [...]

Last LGM and its typographic excitements has brought the DIN – Das Ist Norm – Loch Ness project to the surface of the Saint Laurent river again in a discussion with Denis Jacquerye from Deja Vu. Back in Brussels, we meet Denis in the temporary OSP Studio at Rue de la Senne to begin to [...]

“Open Source doesn’t mean free access, nor open space or open air; it presumes a seamful approach to design as a response to the increasing reliance on technology and its accessibility”
http://jaromil.dyne.org/journal/research_2009.html…

“Only rarely, if indeed ever, are a tool and an altogether original job it is to do, invented together. Tools as symbols, however, invite their imaginative displacements into other than their original contexts. In their new frames of reference, that is, as new symbols in an already established imaginative calculus, they may themselves be transformed, [...]

16 Janvier
Liège, Belgium
Palais Châlet
spécial de soutien
- Révérberations Touchantes -
With
Live
Bruno Coeurvert
Pierre Normal
Dj’s
JB from Paris, Athome, Atka, Le Caniche Noir, Le Diamant Tendre
20h, Rue chauve-souris 62, Liège, 2 euros.
Feel welcome to spend this lovely, romantic and supporting night. Where OSP crew meet, where they party, where they hear their favorite music, and where they they dance. [...]

Of course we discuss now and than amongst ourselves, whether it is better to change ‘Open Source Publishing’ to: ‘Free Software Publishing’ (FSP…), or maybe: ‘Free, Libre and Open Source Publishing’ (FLOSP!). Reading Rob Myers text ‘Open Source Art Again‘ makes me bring it up here:
The name Open Source was deliberately chosen for its meaninglessness [...]

Out now: The Mag.net reader 3: Processual Publishing. Actual Gestures, edited by Alessandro Ludovico and Nat Muller.
From the introduction:
“a radical change is to be detected between the lines: publishing on paper is not about rigorously selling and distributing content to a specific target readership. It is more a ‘gesture’ that creates a space of intimacy [...]

The hard and well documented work of a Dutch Belgian Python artist and designer – Stani – to produce a coin devoted to Dutch contemporary architecture, using only floss. The stroke font he design for it is simply beautiful (currently no info on availability). Via Dave’s understanding blog.

For everyone (like me) who keeps re-reading the 1992 edition of Robin Kinross’ Modern Typography: an essay in critical history… his revised edition (published in 2004) ends in an interestingly different way*:
“The phrase ‘democratization of typography’ has become common, referring to the wide availability of the tools of production for type and typographic design. One [...]

Philosopher of science, Bruno Latour, opened the recent Networks of Design conference with a keynote address: A Cautious Prometheus? A Few Steps Toward a Philosophy of Design. In his lecture, Latour linked the growing importance of design with his idea that “matters of fact” have become “matters of concern“.

Dave Walden from the TeX User Group introduces his excellent TUG Interview Corner as follows:
“technology is created by and evolves with use by people, and the points of view and backgrounds of the people influence the technology”
The ever growing list of interviewees include Barbara Beeton, Donald Knuth, Herman Zapf and numerous other less widely known [...]

Matthew Fuller: One of the things that is notable about OSP is that the problems that you encounter are also described, appearing on your blog. This is something unusual for a company attempting to produce the impression of an efficient ’solution’. Obviously the readers of the blog only get a formatted version of this, as [...]

These past few days I’ve been navigating a sea of acronyms, neologisms and tiny iconic metaphors here at LGM. The thing that I can’t get out of my head is the tool that pippin of GIMP used for his talk. At first it looked like a PowerPoint clone, but then he started correcting it on-the-fly [...]

David Reinfurt’s essay Making do and getting by departs from the work of Muriel Cooper and Anthony Froshaug, and relates their critically engaged practice to contemporary projects such as Juerg Lehni’s Scriptographer. In this way, he convincingly shows how designers can and should reclaim a more intimate relationship with the digital production of their work. [...]

While looking for designers writing about their relation to tools, I discovered the excellent William Morris Archives, part of the Marxist writers’ Internet Archive. To Morris, to own his means of production, was the only way a designer/workman could find back pleasure in work, and this in turn he considered a prerequisite for the [...]

“It may well turn out that one of the most important effects of open source’s success will be to teach us that play is the most economically efficient mode of creative work.” (Eric S. Raymond, postscript (2000) to The Cathedral and the Bazaar)

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“Neurath’s pictograms owe much to the Modernist belief that reality may be modified by being codified – standardised, easy-to-grasp templates as a revolution in human affairs. But the templates themselves, or the code, may end up in their turn aestheticised, reified, in need of a further round of de-cryption, a paradigm common also to failed [...]

The Institute of Network Cultures published an insightful study on the culture of new media work by Sociologist Rosalind Gill. Technobohemians or the new Cybertariat? New media work in Amsterdam a decade after the web, is based on 40 ’semi-structured’ interviews with practitioners (designers, developers, artists, information architects, …). Her study reveals the often [...]

Craig Bradney and Peter Linnell discuss the future of Free and Open Source Software for commercial printing:
Right now, I would say the biggest weakness from an FOSS point of view is there are few good high quality fonts. It is one of those areas which requires tremendous amounts of QA to make them reliable in [...]

Ellen Lupton’s question: Why would a typeface designer want to give a font away? sparked off a series of comments worth reading. The discussion shows how much typographers struggle with ‘open source’ as an idea. It makes you wonder why Lupton decided to ask ‘to give away a font’ and not ‘to share source’ – [...]

Stroom Den Haag started their year long project After Neurath with a public symposium. After Neurath looked/looks at the relevance of 1930’s philosopher and information activist Otto Neurath, and as you can imagine various familiar issues came up.
More information about Otto Neurath: http://www.stroom.nl/webdossiers/webdossier.php?wd_id=3530772
The project is curated by Steve Rushton. Speakers: Frank Hartmann, Robin Kinross, Kristóf [...]

James Love just posted this interesting report on Nettime:

When standards are political — ODF (the Open Document Format)
Yesterday I attended a meeting hosted by TACD at Harvard’s Berkman Center about a very important issue — one that is both highly technical and political at the same time — the battle over the Open Document Format [...]

Les nouveaux habits de la copie, Nicolas Malevé
Text available on line: http://www.constantvzw.com/downloads/nouveaux_habits.pdf
PDF lay-out: habits_quarantainec.pdf
PDF cover: cover_robot.pdf
License: Copyleft, License Art Libre
Date of publishing: 07-07-2006 (Quarantaine)

Maternal Politics, Irina Aristarkhova
Text available on line:
PDF lay-out: maternal_politicsb.pdf
License:
Date of publishing: 03-06-2006 (Digitales)