Abstract
In this article we examine Commoners Press, an experimental letterpress in Australia, from the perspectives of public pedagogy, transition design, and pluriversalism. Since 2017 the press has re-activated its anachronistic 70–100-year-old letterpress machines, bringing them back into play in the community through participatory workshops. Participants collaborate while producing visual images and set type that respond to their current community with articulations of ‘everyday life’ as fundamental precursors to sustainable transition (Irwin et al., 2015). This work brings participants together in a collaborative, materially augmented conversation, and collective imagining of possible futures, all different, all together (Escobar, 2017). Positioned as 'public pedagogy' (Charman & Dixon, 2021), it utilises 'warm data' (Bateson, 2017) to facilitate ‘interpretive communities’ (Santos, 2017) through ‘counterfactual actions’ (Forlano & Halpern, 2023). The discussion explores how projects like this might allow us to understand what it means to design for ‘human scale’ in the age of the Anthropocene.
Keywords
transition design; community; public pedagogy; letterpress
DOI
https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2024.1163
Citation
Ragnar Haslem, N., and Hendrik Brueggemeier, J. (2024) Reimagining the Printing Press as a Collaborative Public Pedagogy and a Site for Nurturing a Creative Community’s Potential for Transition, in Gray, C., Ciliotta Chehade, E., Hekkert, P., Forlano, L., Ciuccarelli, P., Lloyd, P. (eds.), DRS2024: Boston, 23–28 June, Boston, USA. https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2024.1163
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Conference Track
Research Paper
Included in
Reimagining the Printing Press as a Collaborative Public Pedagogy and a Site for Nurturing a Creative Community’s Potential for Transition
In this article we examine Commoners Press, an experimental letterpress in Australia, from the perspectives of public pedagogy, transition design, and pluriversalism. Since 2017 the press has re-activated its anachronistic 70–100-year-old letterpress machines, bringing them back into play in the community through participatory workshops. Participants collaborate while producing visual images and set type that respond to their current community with articulations of ‘everyday life’ as fundamental precursors to sustainable transition (Irwin et al., 2015). This work brings participants together in a collaborative, materially augmented conversation, and collective imagining of possible futures, all different, all together (Escobar, 2017). Positioned as 'public pedagogy' (Charman & Dixon, 2021), it utilises 'warm data' (Bateson, 2017) to facilitate ‘interpretive communities’ (Santos, 2017) through ‘counterfactual actions’ (Forlano & Halpern, 2023). The discussion explores how projects like this might allow us to understand what it means to design for ‘human scale’ in the age of the Anthropocene.