User:Manetta/Toward a Minor Tech

Minor Tech … is a newspaper. A printed newspaper that might travel in our bags, that we can give away to friends or collaborators, and put on the tables of our collective spaces and institutions.

I have been closely involved in the production and design of this newspaper, together with Simon Browne who unfortunately cannot be here today. I am part of a collective space called Varia (the one of the 6 v's) and work on publishing projects that involve both design and tool making, to create collective publishing environments that break away from proprietary, linear and single outcome publishing workflows.

Toward a Minor Tech, the newspaper, is made in a “wiki-to-print” environment, that brings editing and design together in one place. Both the texts and design of the newspaper were produced during a two-day sprint, which created an intense collaborative production process in which the design and content emerged at the same time.

Wiki-to-print emerged from a way of working with a set of tools that includes MediaWiki, Paged.js and CSS Print standards for Paged Media. The wiki is used to write, edit and structure all the texts and visual materials, but also to sketch and design the lay out of the printed publication. The content is rendered into one single page, which is turned into HTML, styled with CSS and exported as PDF using the built-in PDF engine of the browser.

The practice of working with wiki-to-print is part of a longer continuum of wiki based workflows and publications made by groups and individuals in Brussels and the Netherlands, including OSP, Constant, TITiPI, Varia and Hackers & Designers. The code that we used to make the wiki-to-pdf publishing environment is published under the CC4r license again, ready to be changed, transformed and reused.

It has been 5 years since I started to work with code and free software to make and generate publications, and it has opened up a lot of possibilities and possible engagements with the environments that shape these publishing practices. For example, to make this newspaper we worked with Paged.js, a javascript library that renders a HTML page into pages, and whose makers joined us for a two-day worksession at Varia last October.

I like to think of such engagements as moments of being shoulder-to-shoulder. It allows me to reflect in which way we depent, or inter-depent, on other actors in the environment. If we are shoulder-to-shoulder as:

editors & designers

How can we work together in non-linear ways as design*editors?

authors & designers

How can we be in dialogue with each other and work from possibilities instead of constraints?

designers & tools

How can we make custom work environments and let tools shape practice shape tools?

tools & browsers

How can we get into conversation with browser makers, now they have become such an important tool in web-to-print practices?

tools & W3C standards for CSS Print

How can we get a voice in shaping the CSS Print standards we in our lay outs?

designers & designers

Where can we exchange, discuss, transform and get together with peer-designers, forming space for solidarity and reflection?

Minor Tech… in this context, resonates for me with being shoulder-to-shoulder with those who co-shape the conditions and possibilities of a work environment. While being shoulder-to-shoulder with many, these design practices sometimes operate on small scales (when making small custom tools) and other times on large scales (when using globally used ones such as browsers). This way of working creates the possibility for me to understand the complexities of scales, and to situate, to negotiate, and engage with the environment I am part of and co-shaping with newspapers like these.