You’re welcome for a series of talks by Dave Crossland

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 [...]

Alessandro Ludivico proudly presents the latest issue of Neural with OSP-designed ad for By Data We Mean At a conference in Amsterdam, the Ippolita collective proposes us to build (and use?) convivial tools, a method for users that ‘neither want to rule nor to be ruled by the Society of the Query’: Detect and locate [...]

When budget is limited and time is short: PoDoFo tiling + wallpaper glue + NotCourierSans to the rescue! Clementine mounts the Constant Verlag colophon for its launch last night in 17 Rue de la Senne

Before starting a fresh new OSP-season, first a post long due: This conversation with Juliane de Moerlooze was recorded March 2009 in the context of Female Icons, a project by De Geuzen but I think OSP-readers might like to read it as well? “when you hear people talk about women having more sense for the [...]

Designing with TeX: episode IV Today we drove up North to the headquarters of Pragma in Hasselt (NL), La Place from where ConTeXt, a document markup language and document preparation system based on TeX, is being developed. The goal of the journey was to resolve some of the issues we encounter while designing a multi [...]

When we began to think about how to establish a more rich and warm collaboration with printers after the cold alerts we experienced during OSP production, Georges Charlier’s appetite for research and openness to exotic solutions reappeared in Pierre’s mind. And since we are preparing some new books, it was time for an update on [...]

A journey through the history and currents of free education, counter-institutional movements and the economy of information in Silicon Valley + beyond. Free Soil presents a bus tour, exhibition, outdoor film/video festival & on-site exchange in conjunction with the 2nd Biennial 01SJ Global Festival of Art on the Edge in San Jose, California. This tour [...]

(forwarded from the research programme Communication in a digital age, Rotterdam) PRINT/PIXEL International conference on the shifting relation between online and print publishing Tuesday-Wednesday 12-13 May 2009 | 12-17:00 (public sessions), 20-22:00 (professional sessions) The conference investigates the shifting relationship between online and print publishing. Both can no longer be separated, but complement each other. [...]

As a side effect of the BPI/cinéma du réel festival, OSP has been asked to “perform” the program map in full scale in the Centre Georges Pompidou main hall, where the festival occurs. The map is a derivative from the printed one, folded into the brochure. It networks the festival selected movies and the subjective [...]

Designing with TeX: episode II “Users only need to learn a few easy-to-understand commands that specify the logical structure of a document“. If only we had sooner understood that user here is writer, not designer, we might have given up earlier. The Not So Short Introduction to LaTeX2 goes on to explain: “They almost never [...]

(Call forwarded from Isabelle Massu) + + + + + + + + + + + + Museums narrate the history of man’s evolution through the display of tools (silex, knife, jar, etc.). In contrast, we are looking for useless tools. This call will result in a vitrine of objects titled ‘Object Inutile’ to be [...]

5 to 7 March, Bordeaux We’re preparing a journey to Bordeaux, France where OSP will contribute to the conference Edit: Norms, formats and supports with a workshop and a lecture. From the conference description: “Signs and pictograms which organize the flow of movement in cities and towns according to graphic “pie charts” and other diagrams, [...]

“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, [...]

Nous sommes heureux de vous inviter à la présentation du livre collectif : – – – – – – – – – – – – – Vomit’ can ich i’neun dî’neun? en quoi puis-je vous etre utile? – – – – – – – – – – – – – qui accompagne l’exposition – – [...]

Inkboard is an Inkscape extension that allows remote collaboration over the network. In inkscape-devel, there’s a thread where people get all excited over it, and manage to bring down a server as a result It’s hard not to get overexcited over tools that have collaboration built into them. They give rise to book covers that [...]

The OSP’s have gathered around their respective working tables in Brussels and Barcelona, to prepare Software History Mapping Night, tonight from 20:30 – 22:00 (GMT+1). For this occasion, Nicolas has created a rudimentary, quick, lo-tech collaborative mapping tool: http://www.ospublish.constantvzw.org/map http://www.ospublish.constantvzw.org/map/sandbox (crazy layers!)*

Wednesday 22 October 20:30-22:00 In a first attempt to draw a collaborative map of the many different tools that together define the practice of digital design, OSP attempts to recollect facts and anecdotes gathered over the last few years. At Software history mapping night we’ll gather around the table to start a visual cartography of [...]

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. [...]

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“.