Prototyping 2024/2025 intro

The tools we will work with this year [1] are hard to access for some. They come from contexts that are often far away from us, such as the tech industry, academic projects or large non-profit organisations; are often made in the US or Europe; are often written and documented in English; and are often made years or decades ago. We as prototypers need to bridge these gaps (culture, language, time) and work at understanding it from our own context [2]. This bridging work is not the same for everyone. The tools will not be equally accessible to everyone in the group. Acknowledging this and helping each other with this work of translation is important. You don't have to do this alone and struggling with it is not a personal failure nor an individual burden. The goals of this year's prototyping sessions are (a) to explore many different free software tools and (b) to do this together.

The feeling of 'not getting it' is valuable. Many of the tools we will work with are documented, but the language and style in which this documentation is written is often very hard to read and based on assumptions that you are already familiar with code. Feel entitled to be upset about this! Even if the makers of the tool didn't make them for us here at XPUB in 2024/2025 specifically, with a group of people from different ages, cultural backgrounds and speaking different languages. The XPUB prototyping staff is asking you to explore these tools, asking you to learn something from it, not to torture you but because we feel there is something very promising in them.

You are very much encouraged to engage with the tools on this level, on the level of you not understanding it and how upsetting and tiring this can be, because it demands more work from you than from others. It's important to acknowledge these frictions as your entry point to these tools. Facing this struggle of 'monsters in borderlands' [3] and lived experience and situated knowledge [4] are at the heart of knowledge building. This class is not about outsmarting each other, it is about learning something together. We are a small enough community of practice [5] to hear each other, to make room for this and to respond to such struggles. We can 'stretch out to affiliate with multiplicity and tend to how we hear each other as a matter of “listening forth” from silence, an active listening' (Star, 1994). Freely translated that means being mindful of things lost in translation and doing the work of figuring out what it all means to us, together [6].

[1] Which will include the command line interface, Python, HTML, CSS, Javascript, VCV rack, analog radio, Arduino, Pandoc, Weasyprint, SVG, Inkscape, pen plotters, dot matrix printers, other printers, ... and more!
[2] This relates to what Raymond Williams described in his introduction to Keywords as an inquiry into a vocabulary, figuring out the development of the way a certain word is understood historically and in times of cultural shifts, when meanings become 'brittle'.
[3] Haraway, D. (1992). The Promises of Monsters: A Regenerative Politics for Inappropriate/d Others. [online] Available at: http://www.zbi.ee/~kalevi/monsters.html
[4] Haraway, D. (1988). Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective.
[5] Star, S. L. (1994). Misplaced Concretism and Concrete Situations: Feminism, Method, and Information Technology. In: Bowker, G. et al. (eds) Boundary objects and beyond: working with Leigh Star. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press
[6] All this on a wiki page, a naturalized object in the XPUB community of practice. We use it for everything, course syllabi, assessments presentations, notes, archives, the calendar, no questions asked.

This description is an attempt to make space for feminist methods in prototyping. The text is a translation of Marloes' introduction to Susan Leigh Star's text ''Misplaced Concretism and Concrete Situations: Feminism, Method, and Information Technology'', written during SI23 Quilting Infrastructures. https://pad.xpub.nl/p/si23-310124