User:FLEM/Graduationprojectproposaldraft

1 What do you want to make?

I want to organise a series of Collaborative Explorative Sessions [CES] (meetings, workshops, experiments, study cases, conversations, surveys) on the topic of notebooks, with the purpose of analysing the use of notebooks in contemporary society as well as trying to increase the awareness and consideration that people have of notebooks as tools, to discover how they are made, how they can be personalised and created by the users themselves.

For the project to continue after the end of the series of explorative sessions, I plan to create an instructional piece/text that users could use to go through the analysis of self and the creation of their own tools, in this case notebooks. The PLAN B is a web page where to give space to the information and documentation that will be gathered through the activities.

2 How do you plan to make it?

(A) Create a temporal community for temporal archives (notebooks): a space to collectively discuss and analyse notebooks to gather information, underline and go beyond the limits of notebooks.

In particular, organise Collective Explorative Sessions [CES] where participants could e.g.: 1. discuss & analyse their own notebooks & find solutions collectively 2. create together new physical prototypes. Or other types of workshops e.g. Exploring pen&paper or Collective writing through the use of notebooks. The idea is that experimenting with the different sides of the use of notebooks, I will gather a major amount of options, ideas and possibilities to be able to work on the interface. These sessions will try to unify thinking and making, as learning through making is the best way to understand and discover our inner self.

To achieve this, I have to plan the dates and study the subject matters of the workshops, reading about history and uses of note taking surfaces, find and contact the locations, start advertising and invite people to join.

• First [CES]: during this session, participants also had a piece of paper to pick from a selection I made for them to start reasoning with their hands/annotation methods throughout the session.
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  first explorative session with xpub2 students on 26.09.22

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  questions I gave the participants to choose from before starting the session

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  the plan of the session 01

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  the plan of the session 02

(B) Create a collection of sample notebook prototypes: together with the participants ideas and prototypes will emerge and their discoveries will become part of my research. I already discussed these topics with my classmates and they are already reacting with their own prototypes. I asked them to write about their process of research. I will also do this work on myself, trying out different notebooks and exploring and writing about the process of discovery I am going through. All the results will be gathered in an accessible web page. The prototypes will include simple and accessible add-ons that users can try out to implement their already-existing notebooks (like pockets, foldings, additional papers..)

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  a multicolumned notebook: could we fold it more?

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  first notebook kit: An adjustable and editable notebook with included tape and papers for continuation

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  sketches for new prototypes

3 What is your timetable?

29 SETT-17 OCT

i want to research and read, work on the glossary, contextualise what I've been creating till now.

study some notebooks' history and development.

I  want to produce another notebook prototype

→ i have to prepare a nicer way to make people talk and think about their notebooks, to organise the right workshop for the public moment at Leeszaal.

17 OCT [PM#1 Leeszaal] - 6 NOV

I have to create a conceptual map that reconnects the uses of notebooks and plan the events for the year based on thematics I described in the above section and organise my case studies in a more structured way --> start to make sketches for the webpage to gather material.

Create another notebook prototype.

Theoretical research on the subject matters.

5 & 6 NOV [PM#2 Zine Camp] - 28 NOV

[18 NOV: project proposal and thesis outline deadline]

Prepare for the next public moment.

Work on the web page to gather material.

Theoretical research on the subject matters.

Create another notebook prototype.

28 NOV [PM#3 Buitenboel] - 10 JAN

[2nd DEC: 1st chapter thesis draft]

Theoretical research on the subject matters.

Create another notebook prototype.

During Christmas maybe i will organise a workshop with my family to observe how people from the outside behave and work with notebooks

Work on the web page to gather material.

JAN-FEB

[17 FEB: 1st draft thesis]

organise a session .

work on notebook instructions digital prototype & web page to gather material.

Create another notebook prototype.

Theoretical research on the subject matters.

MAR-APR

[31 MAR: 2nd draft thesis]

organise a session .

work on digital prototype & web page to gather material.

Create another notebook prototype.

Theoretical research on the subject matters.

APR-JUN

[14 APR: thesis deadline]

organise a session .

working on a prototype in which presenting the written thesis: a modular notebook that contains all the information to be used in all directions, connected by the user

finish the digital prototype and web page

4 Why do you want to make it?

I am interested in the act of annotating as a mean of creativity, a space for thinking and reasoning, a personal world inside this messy world we live in. I like the idea of getting lost in our own space, how writing and doodling and drawing can become part of our living. And this personal world cannot be the same for everyone, cannot be standardised. My idea is that everyone has different needs while using a notebook and that the efficiency (in the sense of: how much we use it, how useful it becomes for us, how we feel free and comfortable with it) can change using a different interface.

Lori Emerson in the book Reading Writing Interfaces describes how in recent years design is getting every day more invisible and users are becoming less and less aware of the processes underneath the devices they use: in the same way as with digital interfaces, humans think less and less about what they use or what they do or why or how. In addition, I think that they are also slowly losing their connection with nature and materiality, and I am wondering if it wouldn't help to reconnect to craftsmanship through the creation of notebooks, the touch of paper and the lines of a pen on the surface, to recreate a little space for ourselves in this fast and angry world. I would like the meetings to be collective experiences of discovery, moments where to play with this object, all together, and explore all the possibilities this interface can offer.

In addition, I have heard some stories about notebooks and I am sure there are a lot more to discover; some of them underlines how easy it is to buy new notebooks but how hard it is to start or finish them: I believe this is also connected to consumerism habits. We live in an era where we can decide to continuously fulfill our desires, without even understanding or asking ourselves what we really need or want. I assume that many people buy notebooks because they are attracted by the idea around the object, but then they never start or finish them because, still my assumptions, they do not really know what is their need of having such an object. I would like to create a space where people can explore, experiment and discover the possibilities of notebooks. I would like participants to explore their inner self and discover what they need from a notebook, and then, if they are up for it, to discover how they are made and how accessible it can be for everyone to create/edit their own, based on what they're actually looking for. Like Notebooks Therapy.

5 Who can help you and how?

Gersande and the Book Binding workshop of Rietvald in Amsterdam

People working with book folding, binding, paper players experts

Collective writing and annotating (Simon Browne?)

I don't know what i need yet it's too early.

6 Relation to previous practice

In the past year as an xpub student I have enjoyed working with language and text. I tried to analyse patterns and on the other side, to disrupt common structures to create new pieces of text, to create “vernacular translations”. Here, I created a prototype of linguistic patterns (as rejection letters) and the impossible project website, a tool for translations. Plus, I used the annotation system created for Special Issue 1 to gather translations from users.

I also started to think about archiving methodologies and how to use archives in a more accessible way and the use of public libraries, so how people interact with books, how to connect people and books. Underlined example of translating one form of research into an activity/event. I always tried to involve a public, to explain more than what seems like needed, had in mind the idea that our public should understand. One of the results of this has been the crosswords game, both for the launch day and for the publication. I like the idea that an audience can interact with what is shown to them: everyone has different learning methodologies, and it’s our job to put everyone in a situation where they can get the best out of the experience.

During Special Issue 2, we discussed an idea I liked a lot: geocaching books. The idea comes from the bookcrossing.com website: books that can be shared, that can move, that are not left into a shelf. A nomadic publication: moving from one media to the other, using different objects so that the publication can move through. Never developed interest in web-to-print tools. Interest in material objects.

In the last trimester, we worked with notation systems, annotation methods and distributive practices, that grasped my interest quite a lot. Miriam and I, for the week02 release, produced an instructional piece on “how to make sound”. The proposals I have been part of are also significant: week5 release was about collective writing, a practice that I find deeply interesting, and I was also interested in the idea of distributive practice (produce—>share—>exchange—>perform—>edit—>produce—>share—>..go on). As well as transcription methods that fed the need of experimenting with text (see Libretto of week3). While talking about instruments and tools, I worked on the Draggable , another online tool to mess up with texts (and audios in this case).

The second editorial proposal was about folder and content nesting: again, the activation by users is essential for the functionality of the tool we created for this release. Again, it was a collective process: the result will be obtained only if others will actively participate.

At a certain point during the last trimester, I started to shape my focus a bit better seeing a particular interest that I developed since the first day but never kept into account: my notebook.

I have been taking notes on different notebooks throughout the year, made by myself. At some point, before making the one for the last trimester, I started to question myself and the notebooks I was using. I wanted to have more, to be able to play with my notebook, to know it better. I started to reason on how, as we’ve been creating our personal digital tools, we could also create our personal analogue tools. Notebooks are individual and personal objects, but they’re treated like everyone has the same need from a piece of paper.

7 Relation to a larger context

https://thecommonplacebookproject.com/

the book of notebooks dan perjovschi

https://www.notebookstories.com/ - blog on notebooks

https://www.mixiwnotebooks.com/

https://www.modubooq.com/custom-notebook/

https://perfect-notebook.com/

http://ratfactor.com/about

https://tumblr.austinkleon.com/tagged/notebooks

https://www.43folders.com/2004/09/03/introducing-the-hipster-pda

8 References/bibliography

Note Taking as an Art of Transmission by Ann Blair (2004)

The author creates a note taking timeline starting with this sentence: “The transmission served by personal notes most often operates within one individual’s experience (…) after used in articulating a thought”. I feel like this point is particularly important for my research as it talks about note taking as an individual’s experience, notes show the insights of an individual expressing freely.

The history of note taking moves from adversaria to common books (that will help for my glossary) and to “kinds of notes”: by field, intended audience, general purpose. This part is particularly important because I think I need to create some limits or instructions of what I am discussing about. It talks about collective annotating (Kant’s students) or “writing chorus” (A. H. Francke).

The author analyses the short-term use of notes and what would happen to them in the past, as well as how to conserve them for future transmission. “Forgetting is also an important aspect of remembering” (Harald Weinrich, 1996). The texts moves on with the history of notes and the impact of early modern note taking, how many scholars studied different ways of note taking and it gives new or additional definitions to the words that regard note taking like lemmata, adversaria, historic, etc..).

The bookbinding workshop: making as collaborative pedagogic practice by Elizabeth Kealy-Morris (2015)

In this text, Kealy-Morris is considering student engagement through collaborative teaching and learning practices. In this case, the purpose is creating a learning space for art and design students to understand and develop their creative identity and self; the connection to my research arrives when the author discusses how the learning experience becomes part of the process of creation.The text touches the importance of craft and how the act of creating is an important step to learn about ourselves: it reconnects to the idea of developing a consciousness in the needs for a learning space made by participants for themselves.

The author discusses the different type of learning and knowledge, experiential, or deductive or constructive learning. This opens a new window on the topic of personalised learning and how every individual has different approaches and methods to reach some kind of knowledge. The purpose of the “Bookbinding Club” proposed in this article reconnects to the purpose of my CES (Collaborative Explorative Sessions): to offer participants experiences where to think about their learning brain and how the act of creation can participate in the act of discovery. How the act of making their own tool can help them better understand what they need from the tool.

Towards the end, Kealy-Morris describes the term ”communities of practice”: workshops based on active engagement with specific experiences that support learning through social participation (Wenger 1998). Learning is a social experience.

Crafting communities of practice: the relationship between making and learning by Miriam Gibson (2018).

This text analyses the impact of craft on learning and the development of the personhood. As the text above, it analyses the learning types, quoting different educators and philosophers, and the impact of the Art and Craft Movement as well as the Industrial Revolution. The author discusses how craft is a cultural and social expression and how collective and individual development are interconnected.

Gibson researches on the impact of industrialisation and mass production on the development of self and how the current interest in making shouldn’t be seen as anti-modern and nostalgic but instead, focussing on how, even through the use of the Internet, makers are always trying to gather, whatever the medium. Another point that I feel like touches my practice is how making and learning are subversive practices that make us able to control the narrative ourselves, undermining the dominant social operating system we live in: “through experimentation and experience, an individual edits amplifies and amends the socially prescribed world” says Korn (2013). In a way, they describe “how to change the world through craft”.

At the end, the author describes how learning is a “transformative learning process” and how developing communities of practice encourages social and cognitive transformation. A way to reconnect process and product, to make learning a moment of sharing and not only taking something from someone else’s knowledge.

All the problems will be solved by the masses By Simon Yuill (2008)

https://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/all-problems-notation-will-be-solved-masses

The part of this article that interests me is the one regarding Nature Study Notes (1969), a text made out of instructional pieces written by the Scratch Orchestra. Some of them talks about ways of making sound but most of them focus on social interactions and games between the performers: “many of the scores in Nature Study Notes set up small scale ‘operating systems', simple organisational structures that enable other works to be produced within them.”.

This is something I would like to include in my work, in a way or another. I would like to create a set of instructions that can be used to go through the discovery of self, through the act of making notebooks for individual or collective use.

Sennett, Richard. The Craftsman. Yale University Press, (2008)

“Making is a basic human instinct”

“Making is thinking”

A discussion on craftsmanship. Still haven’t found a part that interests me.

THE USE OF PERSONALIZED NOTEBOOK AMONG FIRST SEMESTER STUDENTS OF UiTM ( 2016)

Describes how the use of personalised notebooks among students can improve learning process. The authors describe how “The quality of students’ satisfaction and experience depend on the effectiveness of using notebook.”. This paper is basically for educators, but it can be applied also from the point of view of the student itself: students have different learning styles and intelligence strengths that a personalised notebook could accommodate. Notebooks are the place where to insert the information and where to analyse it, helping the “brain making connections between what is experienced (learned) and what that experience (information) means to the learner” (Caine & Klimek, 2005).

The text then analyses student-entered learning approach, already present in Malaysian Education since more than 20 years. Personalised notebooks offer similar characteristics and purposes: to promote self-learning process.  

The authors conclude saying that “Creating a personalised notebook with students could improve students’ note-taking skills as well as help them to organise, review, and reflect on the information in the classroom”. This reconnects to my research as this is what I am discussing about: how personalised notebooks can improve learning. The difference is that they talk from the point of view of the educators and my approach would be even more “self-learning”: students or participants would physically and concretely create their own personalised notebooks.

Introduction to communities of practice by Etienne and Beverly Wenger-Trayner  (2015)

In this text, the authors give a general description of the term “communities of practice”. “Communities of practice” are a useful approach to knowing and learning, formed by people who engage in a process of collective learning in a shared environment. I am reading about this because I find really fascinating the idea of “learning” together, discovering and sharing each other’s knowledge.

“Communities of practice” are composed by the shared domain of interest, the community that engages in discussions and activities, and the practice. Members share experiences, tools, stories, recurring problems etc and try to go through them together. This concept is part of a research on learning theory and learning models, that can reconnect with my own research on how we can shape our learning methodologies. After reading, I understood that “communities of practice” are not something that casually appears because one person is interested, but there is the need of a mutual connection between the participants. I found it interesting and I hope in some way collective learning will be part of my discussion.

This text also brought me to know the authors that research about social learning and practice, something that sounds like what I am interested about.

Why We Make Things and Why it Matters by Peter Korn (2015)

The author gives an outline of his connection with the manual activity and profession of wood furniture maker, but this is not why the book is important to my research.

What matters is the way the author discusses craftsmanship as engagement with the actions, objects and relationships of ordinary experience, caring about what you do. In the sense that, if you choose to use a notebook for example, you should take care of making it yourself, to repair it yourself and feed it yourself, as you would do with a bike or your last night’s dinner. He provides definitions of the term craft, born thanks to Morris and Ruskin and the Arts and Crafts Movement. He underlines how “The increase in sophistication has not resulted from any biological evolution of our species; instead, it illustrates the evolution of culture. “.

The authors at some point says that “work has been stripped of its potential to provide meaning and fulfillment” and I feel the same happened to learning: I feel like this could be changed with social and collective learning, with self-learning and a research inside our heads to understand and listen inside a bit more.

Then, the author describes that his “experience has been that the effort to bring something new and meaningful into the world – whether in the arts, the kitchen, or the marketplace – is exactly what generates the sense of meaning and fulfillment for which so many of us yearn so deeply. “ This tells me how much and why the act of making gives the user that sense of meaning that sometimes we lack in contemporary society.

The author argues how the power to provide spiritual sustenance resides in the object itself, not in its ownership, how it becomes a memory device where the process of creation is inscribed and how objects are important for humans as they “confirm the owners’ narratives of personal identity”: “objects ultimately possess meaning to the extent that they affect or confirm the stories through which a respondent constructs his identity and orders his world. The more central those narratives are, the more meaning the object has. “. I am wondering how much meaning objects can have if the owner creates the object by themselves, so that not only the part of the discovery and acquisition of the object becomes important to the owner and has a reconnection to their life, but also the evolving ideas and beliefs that come along during the process of creation of the object.

To conclude, the author believes that “making is a lifelong project of self-construction and self-determination“ and that objects “are conduits through which we construct our selves and our world.”