Alexandre Leray, Stéphanie Vilayphiou (eds.): Considering Your Tools: A Reader for Designers and Developers (2013)

“A teaching tool that makes the research accessible to design students and young professionals. This reader will provide them with accessible theory so that they can put the radical changes that are taking place in their profession, into perspective.”

“Today’s creation largely depends on digital tools. Far from being a neutral means to an artistic achievement, those tools are actually opinionated: they carry values and are full of conventions about the way things “ought” to be done. To us, a greater awareness of the role of digital tools is—if important to everybody—crucial in the education of artists and designers. Instead of means, the soft- and hardware tools can become partners to consciously think and converse with, to question and interrogate and to clash with. And because (visual) creation is so tightly coupled with technological development, a larger awareness of these tools can help one speculate about future practices and invent the tools to support them.

Contrary to other contemporary fields of creation, there is little literature on these questions in the sphere of graphic design. This is why we felt it was important to bring together texts and showcases on this topic into one comprehensive corpus: a tool to think about tools.

This publication contains newly commissioned, translated and re-issued texts, distributed over 5 chapters: Discrete Gestures is about how our body is informed by our digital tools; Reading Interfaces takes on different approaches to computer literacy; The Making of the Standards is about the social and technical processes behind the elaboration of norms; Myriadic Composition Tools tackles the question of software as a cultural object through the lens of digital typography; Finally, Shaping Processes discusses methodologies for open and critical collective practices. For each chapter, a short note problematize the questions behind the texts.”

With texts by Isabelle Stengers (0); Gerrit Noordzij, William A. Dwiggins, Evan Roth et al., Donald E. Knuth, Vilém Flusser, Friedrich A. Kittler, George Francis, Pierre Huyghebaert (1); Florian Cramer, Alexandre Leray and Stéphanie Vilayphiou, Olia Lialina, Lev Manovich (2); Denis Jacquerye, Unicode Inc., Anthony Froshaug, Open Source Publishing, Henri de Montrond, Martin Arnaud, Mark Pilgrim, Mailing list www-talk, Eric Schrijver (3); Maurice Girod, Robin Kinross, Femke Snelting and Alexandre Leray, Jacques André et al. (4); Christopher M. Kelty, Matthew Fuller, and Aitor Méndez (5).

Co-editors: Nicolas Malevé, Yvan Monroy Lopez, Lilly Nguyen, Camille Pageard, and Eric Schrijver
Publisher Libre Graphics Research Group, May 2013
Various licenses

About

HTML

For more on libre graphics, see Monoskop wiki.