Lukas Engelhardt

This is what team Diacrew did.

How it all started

In the second lesson of the quarter, everybody from team REX shared their initial ideas and points of interest, after which we were asked to form teams. That was a long and uncomfortable situation, mostly when it came to telling someone that they were the one that "didn’t fit” the group. Somehow Carmen, Arthur, Daniel and I ended up in a group together. I took notes in that first sessions, these were our main points of interest at that point:

Daniel

• Ways to attract the alumni to generate content
• low cost, concepts to achieve that
• create a system/software to log all the data that also influences the design, publishing of the publication
• Software based! Focus on the backend.
• Analogue: matrix printing to give away?

Arthur

• explore the craft of making a magazine, translate print into digital, make the content social based!
• Make it open source, decentralised, customized
• Include people that are not finished yet?

Carmen

• Not one magazine
• Create a publishing house of the school
• Focus on topics of interest, rather than just portfolio. Literature, philosophy, sources of inspiration
• Randomness in the editorial part. Share knowledge, don’t restrict yourself
• A central place to organise content/research
• A place for people to share also their own reflection etc.

Lukas

• Multimedia - what can that mean, maybe also analogue
• How to generate content? Who makes content? Can we use original work instead of writing about alumni’s works?
• how can you go away from the magazine as just being a static magazine but make it “interactive”, multimedia, add another layer of experience? Something with folding maybe? Glueing? What is the easiest way to distribute it - as a cube that you have to assemble?
• articles: styles of writing, reports, insights: who writes the articles, how?
• interactive print - something that can be read/done together, or pieced together maybe?
• A magazine can be something that people don’t just read, but that they also act upon
• who was it targeted at? how to reach those people?
• alternative models of distribution: do it yourself? Together with other art schools, institutions maybe?
• democratisation of production: everybody has a printer, see beyond social
• magazines are often cheap, throwaway objects. Then there is high class magazines that you collect but that’s not so interesting for us, money and all. Can we make something cheap, with a throwaway character where it’s somehow good to throw it away? Something with recycling, or can it have another purpose after * It’s read? Like you can plant a seed with it or something like that

The Beginnings

After some initial brain storming sessions we had agreed on a few themes and general ideas, after which we created a first plan of action. I remember that Mantas was talking about the notion of what an alumni is in that first lesson; do people that quit school or changed their practice count? We decided they did, and we wanted to find a system for the school to build up a dialogue with them.

One thing we were all very interested in was “openness”, also in journalism. I had fist been assigned to the Beyond Social team, and had gotten a short introduction about it before I could convince all the involved teachers that I would be much happier working on the REX assignment. I did however really like the publishing system behind REX and took some of the ideas with me into this new assignment - initially also, and especially the print on demand function. At this point we were all very fixed on a physical component of the end publication. We were thinking about this print on demand function but also about events, talks etc. that could company the web publication.

We agreed that we would try something based on content provided by the alumni, rather then just writing showcasing them. To get to these topics we wanted to interview some of them, and try to find interesting topics, themes, possibilities for content basically. It’s important to note that at this stage we were not planning to take on the roles of editors but were looking at the interviews more as a starting point for us to find about about our options in terms of content.

We weren’t sure where this would ultimately go but we started looking for, and then contacting a lot of alumni. We set up a standard email, but often also just wrote personalised emails. From the beginning we had agreed that we would like to try out different kinds of interviews, but especially through the alumni's responses we got pushed further in that direction. We got a lot of answers and almost all of them were very open to the idea, so we just started to schedule interviews. The first one we did was with the cheap fashion lady. In this period we made out first plan of action:

1. Generate topics

• Talk to the alumni!
• It doesn’t matter when they graduated or what they do now
• In a conversation with them try to find interesting topics, themes, statements, something

2. Generate Content

• Ask the alumni if they would directly like to contribute to the magazine
• We could publish an interview, maybe combined with or focused on photography
• We could ask them to contribute original content: a piece of work, an essay, an account of events, etc.
• We take topics/statements from the conversations with the alumni, and ask the school to react to it:
• This can incorporate students or teachers, the people at the stations or the FaDi
• There is no limit to the type of content: text, image, artworks, whatever

3. Categorise content (back end)

• We categorise the content that we created in a sort of Wiki, or any other content management system
• We tag things (cross reference) and relate it to their “origin"
• There should be access to the original source of information (interviews, conversations)
• It should be clear to which person this relates: what year, which domain, which alumni
• It should be possible to read through the whole interview/conversation that we had with them in order to be able to react to it

4. Showing content (front end)

• An online publication that displays the content from the back end automatically
• sorted by tags etc
• some kind of other manifestations of the content, however packaged:
• posters
• events/talks
• a printed issue/selection

Our template mail

Dear (person),

we are four Graphic Design students from the Willem de Kooning academy working on a redesign for the school’s alumni magazine R-EX. We are in the process of creating an online magazine that is based on interviews and original content by alumni students. The current members of the school then have the option to freely react on the content in the form of texts or related art works. Hopefully this will lead to an active conversation between current and former members of the academy.

We’re sending you this email to ask you if you would like to contribute to this publication in the form of an interview! If so, we would really like to invite you to an informal cup of coffee or lunch, or if that is not possible drop by at your current work or set up a Skype interview! We’re focusing on things related to your time as a student at the Willem de Kooning Academy but are open to all kinds of topics, form and content!

We hope to hear back from you soon!

Best regards, Lukas, Carmen, Daniel & Arthur

Refining the Concept

We continued discussing our concept and possible design decisions. We really wanted to make it an open interface that allows room for breaking rules and new ways of displaying and organising content. We looked at several contemporary websites and were also thinking about something that is self generating, or changes forms every time you visit the page. Daniel started scripting something that changed colour and font size based on how often a certain letter appeared in a text for example. In general we all agreed we wanted something “rough”, layered, maybe even chaotic.

In this stage we also came up with our idea for the comments. We were initially inspired by Soundcloud and were trying to translate that to our website: What if it’s possible to literally comment anything anywhere on the page, like a inboard? We tried finding existing examples online but didn’t find much.

At the same time we started thinking more about the content. We knew that we needed content in order to see where this was going, and we had gotten our first responses from alumni, even though we had not yet interviewed anybody. We started thinking about the situations we would be in with the alumni, and how we could influence them. Rhetorically but also through designed situations: where we would meet them, things we would prepare, how we would manage to keep the situation natural.

This made us question our role as editors more and more, or rather made us aware of it. While initially we were hoping for contributions by the alumni we realised more and more that we would have a direct impact on the content we would publish, that it would include our opinions, personalities and biases.

The Interviews

Scheduling interviews

The main phase of the project had started! We scheduled more and more interviews, and started interviewing people, and recording the results. We even created a google calendar to schedule our interviews.

First design sketches

At the same time we started to design our possible end product, also because we had to give a first presentation in March. We went through a lot of different ideas and layouts, and ended at a tag/filtration based navigation. We started of with a wireframe that I made and then started exploring some visual directions. These were rough sketches, also for us, and not intended as actual end results.