D*signweek 2025

How do your practice and projects relate to the design week motto, “For who(m) is the making?”

The design week motto asks about the inter-dependent relationships between designers, audiences and design itself. This inter-dependency is also expressed in OSP’s circular motto “Tools shape practice shape tools...”. It’s not a huge stretch of the imagination to make the same connection between those who develop or host tools and those who use them.

CC is (currently) a server for design and publishing experiments. CC is also currently two people (hardly a crowd). We have practices based around making tools, making layouts and making public and we want to find others with whom we share common ground and needs. While the CC server hosts F/LOSS tools that are offered for public use, we want to form a convivial (rather than purely commercial) relationship with them.

Do you have any examples of specific self-developed practices or tools you use in your work?

We struggle with the term “self-developed” when describing our practices or tools, as it is easy to think that they are independent. And nothing could be further from the truth!

The tools and practices of CC are situated within our experiences as part of collectives such as OSP (Open Source Publishing) and Varia, as well as within the ethics and culture of organisations we relate to, such as lurk.org, riseup.net, and indeed, servus.at (among many others, too many to list here).

Tools on the CC server, such as octomode and wiki-to-print have been developed by CC, but have roots in a 20+ year history of F/LOSS design and publishing practices in the Netherlands, Belgium and France.

For more on pad- and wiki- publishing workflows within our network, we recommend checking out this page collated by Constant VZW: https://constantvzw.org/wefts/webpublications.en.html

What does “radically open”(in design) mean to you?

We would prefer to be "radically close" than "radically open". Openness implies complete transparency, where the aim of being transparent is to strive for frictionless collaboration. But we feel that it is within frictions that the most interesting and important parts of working together can be explored. Being completely open is indeed a radical gesture, but it also makes it difficult to see the limitations. The CC server is not for everyone. We have written a set of collective conditions that limit its use based on our politics and the physical limitations of the server and us, its system administrators.

Please share with us some references to texts and articles that inform and support your practice

What is the cultural/socio-political and/or design context the work is relating to?