Working with what's there

If we consider design to be a collaborative, transformative activity of world-building as opposed to just problem-solving, how to think about the materials, entities, and groups that are there to work with?

What does it mean to work with material that is already there? What does this bring to a design practice?

I'm trying to articulate this in writing on this page. Here is a place to start gathering thoughts around these topics:

• starting from the middle
• working within a material practice (I want to relate this to these thoughts about experimental publishing)
• autonomy (choosing inter-dependencencies)
• subsistence and frugality
• immediacy and DIY
• collaboration and DIWO
• finding joy and inspiration within limitations
• pedagogy and figuring things out together
• improvisation and ad-hoc approaches

While making design and art in the past years, I've noticed that working with what is around me has been a successful approach.

One example is an improvised sticker set I made while working on SomeTimes with Danny at Varia. We were struggling to find inspiration while designing stickers that reflected the theme of Varia's 2025/2026 Seasonal Computing public programme. Danny suggested making a "DarkTimes" sticker set, which contained inside jokes and puns. I had some pre-cut circular sticker sheets laying around from a project in 2012, so I decided to try out some designs that I could print myself. I designed a sheet using a font I bootlegged in 2015 from an Inuit calendar. I've been using this font quite a lot lately, because it is there. The apostrophes as accidentally reversed, but I don't want to fix that because it is not necessary and the font will only be used for display text. What is more important is that the font, like the pre-cut sticker sheets, is at easily at hand.

The full sticker set

One of the stickers on my laptop