User:Francg/expub/thesis/thesis-outline
Thesis Outline
Draft
What you want the thesis to be about?
I want the thesis to be a bridge between the digital and the handmade, showing a research focused on the study of techno-dependency and techno-phobia of people in society, showing discussions that can function as speculative future scenarios, e.g.: "Who would be able to design a book in a post-apocalyptic digital era where Adobe no longer exists (neither other similar software replacements)? maybe only coders." This could be an interesting argument to stretch out in order to analyze and interpret possible directions of the actual socio-technological influence and bring attention to the close connections between technology, politics, economy and design.
For instance, the book "Conversations" shows how a book can be designed using markdown languages and to still keep a beautiful layout with code-based imagery. It offers a good example of a workflow (based on existing platforms + tools; namely etherpad (web based text editor), latex (specific mdown reader) or bash (shell scripting), which in this case involves "sociality" with a group of participants.
It is indeed a laborious handwork bearing in mind that nowadays we have software to ease layout making, nevertheless it is a way to encourage designers, artists, writers and people with different profiles or levels of specialization, to use different methodologies for creating a book, maybe becoming a bit more like developers, in order to question our self-sufficiency & dependency in the creative process and the social significance of these tools we are using.
What is exciting about this, is that markup text can transition and acquire the physical qualities of rough-looking printed matter and more; (e.g. "Autonomous Archive" project, html/css -> to printable PDF). What other experimental publishing forms or collaborative spaces can this body incorporate? Can this alter and modify research and production processes by allowing users to configure it? Would this material be aimed for designers, non-designers, youth, politicians... and to what purpose? What is the pedagogical value of having a sort of technological freedom? Can this type of workflow be interesting for documenting a dialogue between man and machine and to highlight the potential of using code without loosing the quality and craft of a handmade work?
Bibliography
sarah garcin: the PJ machine (Publishing Jockey) -> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mvL6N168Dg4
Ricardo Lafuente -> https://pzwiki.wdka.nl/mediadesign/Lettersoup
http://conversations.tools
https://www.forkable.eu/generators/dit/o/free/A3/dit-A3-001.pdf
https://archive.org/details/designforbrain00ashb
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https://github.com/adam-p/markdown-here/wiki/Markdown-Cheatsheet
http://www.latex-project.org/
http://pandoc.org/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/epub
https://www.scribus.net/
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