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examples ideas & suggestions news

Workbooks for community knowledge networks


Last year Proboscis collaborated with a group of local people and a community run centre (PAG) in Pallion, Sunderland to co-create and co-design a sustainable ‘knowledge network’ that could help people respond to the bewildering array of changes taking place in the benefits system. Our project became the Pallion Ideas Exchange (PAGPIE) – weekly meetings and get togethers run by and for local people to help each other identify and address problem, share information and experience and help share the results with others in the community. A key part of our collaboration (the project was also part of the Vome research project led by Dr Lizzie Coles-Kemp at the Information Security Group of Royal Holloway University of London) was the tools we designed to help the community think through not only how they could identify problems and opportunities, but also how they could figure out what they as individuals and as a group already knew and could share with others. All the tools were designed to be easily produced/reproduced using standard office stationery or, in the case of the larger posters, could be cheaply printed at a local copy shop. Everything was also designed to be easily captured for sharing on the web via blogs, twitter, facebook etc – in whatever way was both safest and most appropriate for the local community.

We devised simple workflows, diagrams and ‘thinksheets’ as well as developing some workbooks and notebooks that individuals could use – all made with bookleteer. We printed up a batch of each using the Short Run printing service, but a key part of the design was that anyone could easily download, print out and make up more copies if they needed to, or the centre could easily order more printed copies as and when they had funding.


We are now creating generic versions of all these tools so that anyone else can set up their own version of a Neighbourhood Ideas Exchange (NIE), can download and make up the notebooks and other tools. We’ve completed versions of the existing 4 notebooks – Experiences, Managing a Problem, Communicating a solution online, Things To Do – and are writing a general guide to the toolkit and NIE concept.

We’ve also been condensing our experiences working in Pallion, as well as many years experience working with other communities both here and abroad, into a playful set of StoryCubes designed to help communities, facilitators and organisers think through the different kinds of steps needed for something like a neighbourhood ideas exchange or other community network. We’re hoping to have the whole toolkit finished in time for the AHRC Connected Communities Showcase on 12th March, where we’ll be showing materials created for our other collaboration with ISG on the Hidden Families project.

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the periodical

Field Work eNotebook

Subscribe to the Periodical to receive your own eNotebook. Complete and return it to Proboscis for digitisation. Several times a year – depending on the quality and quantity of what we receive – we will select and print a Field Work eNotebook for inclusion in a Periodical issue.

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the periodical

Field Work, a project for the Periodical

For a decade or so we’ve been designing custom notebooks and sketch books for use in projects and workshops – for individuals, groups of participants, communities and some just for anyone who wants to use them. There’s a small library of ‘eNotebooks’ on Diffusion – many by us and some by others (see below and/or click for an example by architect Rob Annable).

Next month I’ll be travelling to Papua New Guinea to share my experiences of using our hybrid digital/paper notebooks for recording and sharing Traditional Environmental or Ecological Knowledge (TEK). Never having worked before in such an extreme climate (Tropical jungle) and in such a technologically remote setting, I’m hoping to learn more about how effective they may be and how much we’ll need to work around them and other constraints to make something locally-specific yet useful and replicable. Right now I’m experimenting with printing eNotebooks on waterproof paper stock to take with me to compare with standard paper stocks for durability and effectiveness.

All this preparation for the PNG trip, along with conversations with my old friend Brandon LaBelle, who was in London recently to teach on this year’s Field Studies summer school, has made me revisit some old concepts and plans for Diffusion Series and dust off one of them. I have also been looking into the remarkable and inspirational Sketchbook Project organised by Art House Coop in Brooklyn, NY to push my original ideas further.

A few years ago, I began to develop an idea for a series of Diffusion commissions that would take the form of a designed eNotebook being given to a number of participants who would be asked to use it to conduct and record field work according to their profession, practice or discipline. Their investigations might be around place, a subject, a process or a community – whatever they choose.
This idea for a series remained a series of sketches and notes as my ideas at the time morphed into the City As Material series of events and collaborative eBooks of Autumn 2010 (and following series). However, with my own imminent PNG field work about to take place and being in the midst of thinking about the nature of what a field notebook or sketchbook might be, the idea has returned and seems highly relevant to the concerns of making and sharing – public authoring – that are driving the ideas behind the Periodical.

Thus Field Work has formed as a new and discrete project that can exist within the framework of the Periodical – each subscriber will receive a blank Field Work eNotebook of their own to record an investigation of their own in (should they chose to do so). All completed eNotebooks sent back to Proboscis will be digitised and made back into eBooks that can be read and downloaded from bookleteer. Depending on how many we receive back, we will select and print someone’s Field Work eBook to be sent out to subscribers as part of the monthly issue – perhaps 2 or three times a year.

Why do this? There is an enduring fascination with the notebooks and sketches of artists, writers, scientists and composers etc – we see this time and again with our own modest eNotebooks for projects which take something unique and handwritten or drawn and make them into ‘shareables’, where the trace of the personal is directly communicated in the digitally reproducible. So much can be appreciated about creative process and intentions from the scribbles as well as the precision of thought, eye and hand that simply evades a ‘finished’ book, typed and formally illustrated. I think that the Periodical and bookleteer both have much to offer not just as a mode of production and dissemination of designed publications, but also as a means of sharing creative process in the raw.

When I first began the long journey towards building bookleteer, back in 2003, we built a rough working prototype of what we called the Generator. I was asked to give a presentation about my concept of public authoring at a symposium held at BT Labs campus, Adastral Park, near Ipswich – People Inspired Innovation. I presented our work on Urban Tapestries alongside the first test eBooks made with the Generator, and suggested how we might in future link them to enable both the sharing of local knowledge and data on mobile geo-annotation systems with physical outputs. One result of this presentation was a series of discussions with anthropologists Genevieve Bell (feral data) and Ken Anderson at Intel Research on how it could be used as a tool for field research : quickly capturing and sharing field work as it happens. Years later I actually got to explore this idea with James Leach when invited to help with the Melanesia Project at the British Museum.

So, working towards a very simple initial template for an eNotebook (i.e. not so highly focused as with some of the ones I’ve designed recently, such as the Soho Food Feast We Are All Food Critics notebook or one I designed for Tim Wright & Joe Flintham’s The Haunter Field Trip) we will send out a printed copy to each subscriber to take part in building up a library of field notes and sketch books. I am also thinking that some field studies and trips – extending the work we’ve done with City As Material – may also form part of this project and would love to hear from anyone interested in taking part or helping organise some.

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news

More recently printed books

Here’s two more books created with bookleteer which have recently been published with our Short Run Printing service.

‘We Are All Food Critics: The Reviews’ was printed for Soho Parish Primary School, so that every child who wrote a review for the Soho Food Feast 2012 could have their own copy and show off their contribution to this beaut of a book. Read more about it here.

‘Don’t Stare At Me’ is a touching book created by Joyce Majiski, documenting a community art project she and Julie Robinson undertook with the Yukon Association for Community Living’s Ynklude group.

Don’t forget: we’ve just slashed the cost of A6 printed books between 30%-50%, and our minimum print run is now just 25 copies. Keep at it bookleteers!

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news

Soho Food Feast: We Are All Food Critics – The Reviews

In May, Proboscis supported the children of Soho Parish Primary School at this year’s Soho Food Feast – a community fundraising event held for the school at which many of London’s celebrated chefs and restaurants provided signature dishes to raise money.

We designed a special eNotebook alongside Fay Maschler, Restaurant Critic of the London Evening Standard, encouraging the children to become food critics and experience the food through all of the five senses. After the event we scanned their reviews and made a sample selection to be published in a compilation eBook (using our Short Run Printing Service) which has forewords from both Rachel Earnshaw (Head Teacher) and Fay. Take a look at the bookreader version below.

Everyone’s already looking forward to next year’s Food Feast and more budding food critics!

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events news

‘We Are All Food Critics’ – Bookleteer @ Soho Food Feast

Bookleteer will be at this year’s Soho Food Feast on Saturday 26th May – a one-day event of demonstrations, tastings and cooking contests, boasting many of London’s most renowned chefs and restauranteurs, in aid of Soho Parish Primary School.

We’ll be encouraging children from the school to sample dishes and become food critics for the day, capturing their responses with a specially designed bookleteer notebook illustrated by Mandy and introduced by Fay Maschler, restaurant critic for the Evening Standard. We’re also going to compile a book of the best reviews which will be sold to raise money for the school.

The line-up is beyond tantalising, and needless to say, it’s all for a good cause. Nom nom nom!

Take a peek at the notebook below.

Categories
inspiration

In the Margins

This recent article from the Guardian Books blog, ponders whether or not it’s acceptable to make notes in the margins of books. Reading it, I was reminded of how annotating draft bookleteer eBooks during the editing and proofing stages of Material Conditions was an invaluable part of the process.

We were able to quickly transform the draft books into the final printed format to get a feel of what they would look like on the page, and then to cross out, change and empathise parts, scribbling notes without feeling they were too precious to make marks on. Having a hard copy of previous changes, with progressive layers all on the same page, lets you revert back if you change your mind – something I’ve also come to appreciate in my own notebooks, when early choices are all too often lost with a newly edited digital file. Working with multiple versions and backing up regularly are safeguards easily neglected, as we all know.

As an alternative, use the online bookreader to preview eBooks without messy edges or any dodgy printer issues, and to show collaborators your work instantly.

Paper or digital? Both.

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inspiration

Diffusion Archive Highlight: Passivhaus eNotebook

Rob Annable, an architect at Axis Design Architects, used bookleteer to create this eNotebook whilst visiting Germany to study Passivhaus design principles. Using a blank eBook complete with trip itineraries and QR code web links, he wrote down observations, and placed in photographs taken and printed on site with a Polaroid PoGo printer. It was then scanned and uploaded it for anyone to view and use. This custom notebook, combining essential trip information and a means to record data in a single artifact, avoids carrying excess documents, and allows for easier cross reference.

Download his notes here.

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inspiration

Diffusion Archive Highlight: Graffito Scrapbook

In August last year, I lent a hand to the Graffito crew whilst they were running an installation at the Vintage at Goodwood festival. Whilst festival-goers doodled on the iPhone app, their drawings were displayed on a huge L.E.D screen, along with everyone else using it. Giles prepared a blank eBook with the Graffito emblem, and lent us a portable pogo printer, so that we could instantly print screenshots onto stickers and place them in the scrapbook. It was later scanned and published on Diffusion, so anyone who played with Graffito at Vintage can therefore own a tangible souvenir of the event. Something so digital and temporary is saved from dissipating, and recorded somewhere other than the imagination.

Download and make it here.

Categories
inspiration

Diffusion Archive Highlight: Cosmo China 20th Anniversary Exhibition

This was created to commemorate the 20th anniversary of Cosmo China, a handpainted ceramic studio and shop in Bloomsbury, London. To celebrate, Cosmo held a special exhibition of 20 plates painted by their artists (and a few special guests) for the occasion, which are showcased in the eBook.

Each page is devoted to one of the plates, and has a brief biography and picture of the artist. The simple format really allows the wonderful designs to shine through, and serves as a great souvenir of the exhibition, or even if the reader wasn’t there, an advert for Cosmo’s talent and charm.

Using eBooks to accompany exhibitions and galleries would make a refreshing change; a portable and attractive guide that trumps individual cards that often get lost or ignored. Curators could also provide an eBook notebook, for people to customise with stickers next to each exhibit that they find interesting – a personalised account of the event.

Read it on Diffusion.