Co-positioning

Collective Co-positioning was a worksession in the context of the Tools Series, organised by Baltan Laboratories:

"The Tools series examines the complex and changing relationships artists and designers have with the technologies and tools they develop, modify or use to create ... We also examine the role of the lab in supporting the creation of, access to and sharing of knowledge about these tools." http://www.baltanlaboratories.org/?p=3191

We worked for a day in the Van Abbe Museum studio on making a start with the Co-position research. More about the co-position research here. Invitation sent out to the participants:

Dear participant in the co-position worksession, dear therefore co-researcher,

Welcome to co-position! For the worksession at Baltan, we would like you to bring a 'spatial arrangement of texts and other graphical elements'. By this we mean a poster, lay-out, design, or just a part of it, that you have made or would have liked to have made. The sample(s) you bring can be completely trivial, various, unfinished or imaginary but please do not forget it! We'll use the analysis of these concrete cases as a way to think form practice about the missing vocabulary of lay-out. An image or scan of these samples will be useful to be able to work with in multiple ways.

We are much looking forward to work with you on Wednesday in Eindhoven!

Greetings from the co-position team: Ana, Ricardo, John, Pierre

Eventually, we formed three groups that each chose their own samples from the specimens collection and method of analysis.

Possible approaches to the collection

1. Source text vs. rendered text: How is the relation between characters and glyphs effecting lay-out tools? What is the relation between author and designer?
2. Elements: What elements matter? Container, space, margin or padding? What is in a name?
3. Projections: Does the page need to be the first reference? What other perspectives can we think of? Gravity, distance, center, measurement, scale.
4. Process, action: speaking from process about lay-out. Relations, movement, tension.
5. Construction vs. presentation: How the technical, physical constraints define lay-out vs. presentational constraints.

Specimens

Here are the specimens we worked with.

Team Research

• Team A (Pierre, Ana, Gijs, Eric de H.): Reverse-design
• Team B (Femke, Ricardo, Tauras): Projections
• Team C (Silvia, John, Eric S): Constraints and processes

Photos

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Schedule

10:00 Introductions

11:30 Building collection, scanning

12:30 Lunch

13:30 Analysis, notations

15:00 Re-passing, re-documenting

16:30 - 17:00 Discussion

19:00 Presentation Baltan Tools series, LGRU etc.

21:00 end