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 the "who" question, which is a great one! We like to think in terms of inter-dependent relationships, so not dependency relations, but mutual relations between different parties, which include designers, audiences, collaborators, tools and designed objects themselves. How do these parties depend on each other and actively shape each other? And how does this shift from thinking about depending on something towards a mutual relationship also shifts things in practice actually? It might sound a bit abstract, but maybe the motto of this sticker that we really like helps: “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 administrated by two people - hardly a crowd. We have practices based around making tools, making layouts, making public what we do, and organizing events around this all, and we want to find others with whom we share common ground and goals. While the CC server hosts F/LOSS tools that are offered for public use, we want to form a convivial relationship with the tools and public.

So to come back to your question.. we are also very much thinking about the "who": who uses the tools we host? who is working on the tools we host? who is part of the layers that we also rely on further in the background? but also: who can we learn with? who do we want to world with?. But all this not without thinking about the "how": how do we run this server together? how do we invite people to use the tools? how can we contribute back to the larger ecosystems?

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, or come from nothing. 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, XPUB, Constant and indeed, servus.at (among many others, too many to list here).

So, 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 a network of networks that lives across the Netherlands, Belgium, France and further.

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". [hmmm, i would like to think about that statement... because it feels like it's more something that is neither open nor closed? but indeed, "close" is not "closed", but like this it feels like it does refer to the opposite of open? hmm!] 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?