CO-CREATIVE PUBLICS

AND PUBLICATION DESIGN

PRACTICE

Marius Foley
CO-CREATIVE PUBLICS
AND PUBLICATION DESIGN
PRACTICE

Marius Foley
S3173399

CO-CREATIVE PUBLICS AND PUBLICATION DESIGN PRACTICE 1

 for

Audrey Foley who connects me to the world

2 CO-CREATIVE PUBLICS AND PUBLICATION DESIGN PRACTICE

DECLARATION

I certify that except where due acknowledgement has been made, the
work is that of the author alone; the work has not been submitted
previously, in whole or in part, to qualify for any other academic award;
the content of the exegesis is the result of the work which has been
carried out since the official research program; and any editorial work,
paid or unpaid carried out by a third party is acknowledged.

Marius Foley
S3173399
Candidate PhD (Communication) (R)

An exegesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements

for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (Communication)
RMIT University Melbourne 2012

Exhibition and presentation website: [Link]

CO-CREATIVE PUBLICS AND PUBLICATION DESIGN PRACTICE 3

4 CO-CREATIVE PUBLICS AND PUBLICATION DESIGN PRACTICE
ACKNOLEDGEMENTS

Thank you
laurene vaughan : for you generosity in sustaining this long process
of developing thought, practice and research, and the patience to wait
for ideas to form into viable material
katherine moline : for tracking my progress and tracing a pathway to
completion
grant ellmers : DSB [doctoral skype buddy] for your relentless
friendship and support through our mutual adventure
jeremy yuille : for transforming Pool into research and your persistent
and generous gifts of expertise and enthusiasm
kyla brettle : for partnering in the collaborative dance that was future
makers future markets, and beyond
sherre delys : for encouraging me to explore the stillpoint in social
and participatory media
peter lyssiotis : for opening hidden dimensions in publication design
and book making
niko spellbrink : for thoughful discussions across many areas and in
many ways
ash perry : for capturing the Design Audio Cloud on film
chris marmo / reuben stanton : for your insights, knowledge and
effort through the Pool project
mcd colleagues : for sharing thoughts, critique and support

bronwyn clarke : for making space in the program for my research

robert alexy : for sustained collegial support

....
new views #2 conference and exhibition : the opportunity to
produce the design audio cloud
acid : support of the pool interaction research and redesign project

abc radio national and multiplatform division : opening the doors

to ABC Pool
editor: Anna McArthur

CO-CREATIVE PUBLICS AND PUBLICATION DESIGN PRACTICE 5

 ABSTRACT

6 CO-CREATIVE PUBLICS AND PUBLICATION DESIGN PRACTICE

This study is situated in the practice of publication design.
I characterise publication design as the act of bringing
thoughts, opinions, information and stories into the public
realm. A publication artefact in this study refers to the
material and non-material form that the communication
takes, such as print, web, audio, or discourse and event.

Through this study I make the case that the professional, mainstream
practice of publication design will change in relation to the way a
public for it changes. In this, design practice is likely to be transformed
in a way that is similar to the transformation in other related practices
such as media and commerce.
To explicate this change in the practice of publication design, I use
the design conversation as a leitmotif to highlight the communicative
interactions within design and between designer and audience.
The term design conversation, represents the communication
flow within the designing and decision-making process (and
among the stakeholders in the design process). It also refers to the
communication flow created by a design artefact (or event) and a public
that forms around it.
Once design moves out of the process (making) phase into the
public sphere—as a publication—the communication flow alters and

CO-CREATIVE PUBLICS AND PUBLICATION DESIGN PRACTICE 7

 expands. Other forces, such as new interlocutors and the way that
design is read, come into play, disrupting the flow and shaping new
communication pathways. I look at what the change in communication
flow alerts us to in new practices.
The audience and how it behaves in the contemporary situation is
central to this argument. To gain an understanding of the audience as
a social arrangement of people who gather around a person, event or
object, I start by drawing on the notion of the public sphere, as described
by Jürgen Habermas. I then progress to discussing discrete publics
(known as a public), which form around a specific artefact or event, as
described by social theorist Michael Warner. By defining the audience as
a public I am able to identify the set of relations in which the designer
becomes a part, and observe the changing nature of the audience.
On completion of this study, I believe it can be argued that
publication design is moving from a broadcast medium to a social and
relational one, where the audience participates in the production of
meaning (or sense-making) by attaining a closer relationship to the
production of design. I use the term co-creative public to describe this
audience. The characteristics of this public are that it is self-organised,
freely associated and forms in response to attention (Warner 2002).
As the relationship between designer and audience evolves
reciprocally, it is possible to reinterpret the role of the professional
designer and to identify the new opportunities presented. I use the role
of Social Media Producer, discerned in the research into Pool, as a way
to articulate the designer’s role in a co-creative situation.

8 CO-CREATIVE PUBLICS AND PUBLICATION DESIGN PRACTICE

NEW VIEWS #2 EXHIBITION,
MELBOURNE MUSEUM 2008:
DESIGN AUDIO CLOUD
CASE STUDY #1

CO-CREATIVE PUBLICS AND PUBLICATION DESIGN PRACTICE 9

10 CO-CREATIVE PUBLICS AND PUBLICATION DESIGN PRACTICE
CONTENTS

Declaration 3

Acknowledgements 5

Abstract 6

Chapter 1: Introduction 12
An overview of the aims and direction of the study and how it was
conducted. This chapter focuses on the following:
Research statement and questions
Contribution to the field
Research design and methods

Chapter 2: Two views on the research 31

Design Conversation
Co-creative Publics

Chapter 3: Case study #1 Design Audio Cloud 66

The initial research project, designed as exploration of
communication and publication using recorded conversations

Chapter 4: Case study #2 Participatory publishing— 78

Backyard Press and Champion Books
A reflection on my experience establishing and working in the
print and publishing collectives , Backyard Press and Champion
Books. I use this experience to compare with the contemporary co-
creative design with location based collective production.

Chapter 5: ABC Pool research and redesign project 108

This major research project focuses on the emergence of new roles
and practices coming out of online social and participatory media.
The research offers insights into how a publication designer can
reconfigure his or her practice to engage with the shift in mainstream
publication design.

Chapter 6: Conclusion 164

Findings of the study and the implications for the field; with a
reflection on my own transformation as a designer through the study

Bibliography 184

CO-CREATIVE PUBLICS AND PUBLICATION DESIGN PRACTICE 11

 INTRODUCTION

12 CO-CREATIVE PUBLICS AND PUBLICATION DESIGN PRACTICE

RESEARCH STATEMENT

RATIONALE FOR THE STUDY

This research has explored the practices of publicaton

design as a specific field within the broader domain of
communication design. In this PhD submission, I make the
case that a publication designer has the capacity to engage
with, lead and adapt to contemporary shifts in the way design
is being produced and consumed, and how our understanding
of what a publication is, and what it is to publish are shifting in
line with new communication technologies.

Publication design has within it the keys to extend the social, relational
and public orientation of design practice. Through a reorientation
away from the medium and towards the audience, this area of design
practice has the capacity to take advantage of the contemporary
mainstream trend in media and commerce towards socially produced
knowledge and meaning. This trend can be articulated as a move
away from broadcast communication (one to many) and towards a
socially orientated mode of communication (many to many). In socially
orientated communication the producers and consumers of design
mutually construct meaning, thus forming a co-creative relationship.

CO-CREATIVE PUBLICS AND PUBLICATION DESIGN PRACTICE 13

 Publication design has the intrinsically social purpose to act as a
vehicle to facilitate the exchange of messages (thoughts, opinions,
information and stories) between people through a third party
artefact. This exchange is performed in the public sphere via broadcast
and narrowcast publications. While there are some publications
that circulate purely among closed or niche audiences, generally a
publication is produced to appear in an open public place (a newsagency
or on the Internet, for example) where a member of the public chooses
from a range of publications what he or she will engage with.
Publication design is also a social practice . By this I mean that the
design process involves people from multiple stakeholder positions
(e.g. writers, editors, designers, illustrators, commissioners) who each
contribute to the creation of a publication.

RESEARCH QUESTIONS

I predicate the study on the notion that, as a social act that occurs in
the public sphere, publication design is open to interrogation and
participation by its public. During the research I became aware of
the growth in design literacy and participation by people who were
formerly classed as a relatively passive audience or consumer.
As I will show in the course of this text, the shift towards an
inclusive design process is possible, due to the formation of a new
type of relationship that is based in discursive co-creation. Yet this
co-creative situation is distinguished from earlier forms of collective
creativity (such as a collective studio), by the fact that by virtue of the
affordances of the technology, the co-creative act can be scaled to
include greater numbers of participants. This is made possible by the
co-creative public comprising autonomous agents who are connected
through discourse rather than by location.
As argued by Jessiac Lipnack and Jeffery Stamps (2000: 180) in
conventional collective forms, effective co-creation was possible up to

14 CO-CREATIVE PUBLICS AND PUBLICATION DESIGN PRACTICE

approximately twenty-five people. However in its contemporary form,
made possible by new literacies, technologies and practices, effective
co-creation can occur at significantly larger levels, which rival the
scope of conventional ‘mass’ media. With this, not only is the scale of
co-production of a publication expanded, but the people who are able
to co-create are also extended in number and expertise.
Rather than pose a threat to the publication designer, this new co-
creative situation has the potential to benefit publication designers,
by providing opportunities for novel interactions with their audience,
which in turn may extend the range of design outcomes that emerge in
the process. In this study, I consider the impact of this change for both
the designer and the audience.
Two core research questions emerged as a result of this perceived
transformation, namely:

What is the place of the designer in an altered relationship between a public

(audience) and design? And, in turn,

How can a public become conversant with the language of design and
participate in the conversation?
I have used these questions to guide me throughout the study.
The questions have acted as a reference point that enabled me to
return to the central objective of the research, namely to describe and
communicate the relationship I observed emerging between designer
and their public in a contemporary form of a co-creative situation.

METHODOLOGY

In order to examine the practices and contexts of contemporary

publication design and its place in broader design discourse, I conducted
practice-based research around three case studies. My intention was to
interrogate the practice rather than the artefacts of publication design.
I distinguish between the practice of publication design, which

CO-CREATIVE PUBLICS AND PUBLICATION DESIGN PRACTICE 15

 I define as an act of bringing thoughts, opinions, information and
stories into the public realm, and the artefact that is a vehicle for this
transfer of knowledge. A publication artefact represents how this act
(of making public) manifests itself in media forms such as print, web,
audio, discourse or event.
Put another way, this study concentrates on the performance of this
act rather than the fabrication of the artefact. While I acknowledge
that both the act and the artefact remain implicit in each other, for this
study I separate them in order to focus on the communicative aspect
of publication design. With this in mind I explore what a publication
is in terms of performance, practice and the discourse between design
practitioner and audience.
Underpinning this investigation and my desire to explore the future
possibilities for a publication designer within broader communication
design practice, is my own practice as publication designer. I have been
actively engaged in the field of publication design as a practitioner
and design educator and researcher for thirty years. As I have worked
through the research I have drawn on this practice, critically reflected
on aspects of it, and then used it as I have undertaken the various
projects of the three case studies that are central to the investigation.

THREE CASE STUDIES

This research through practice has been framed as three case studies
of design practice over the past three decades. Each case study offers
a different perspective on the practice of publication design with
particular insights into how the practice operates and how this can be
applied to contemporary contexts.
The first two cases were instrumental in establishing the scope of
the research questions. I will summarise them in Chapter 4 of this
document with a focus on the insights they offered for establishing a
framework for a new kind of publication design practice.

16 CO-CREATIVE PUBLICS AND PUBLICATION DESIGN PRACTICE

DESIGN AUDIO CLOUD

The first case study was a speculative project titled Design Audio
Cloud. In this I use a design project to provoke and develop the
research question. Design theorist Christopher Frayling (2004) terms
this approach as research-through-design, where the design activity
generates the research.
I designed this project to challenge my thinking on what a
publication is. In so doing I was able to question my own assumptions,
which were based on my practice over thirty years as a print-based
publication designer. In this project I was primarily concerned with the
notion of publication design as a conversation. I also used the project
to explore alternative material forms of publication.
The form the Design Audio Cloud took was an audio installation
comprised of recorded interviews with design practitioners. The work
was installed as part of the New Views 2 Conference exhibition of
design posters in London and Melbourne in July and November 2008.

BACKYARD PRESS/CHAMPION BOOKS COLLECTIVE EXPERIENCES

In the second case study I critically reflect on a seminal period in

my own publication design practice. In this reflection on forming
and working in the print and publishing collectives Backyard Press
and Champion Books, I concentrate on making explicit the social
experience of working in a publishing collective. I use this critique as
a means to contrast the small-scale co-creative situation as it existed
in Backyard Press and Champion Books (physically and temporally
constrained) with large-scale co-creation (virtual and asynchronous),
which is the case in the Pool (the third case study of the research).
I draw on this reflection to consider how large-scale co-creation
can work in a pro-am (professional and amateur) context, by referring
to an autonomous, self-managed role used in the Backyard Press
collective model.

CO-CREATIVE PUBLICS AND PUBLICATION DESIGN PRACTICE 17

 ABC POOL

The third case study and key research project of this PhD is the ABC
Pool project. This project draws together the core themes that emerged
in the first stages of the study, namely: the design conversation and
co-creative publics. These themes also form the loci for the literature I
have used to underpin this practice-based investigation.
In 2008 the ABC (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)
commissioned research into ABC Pool (referred to in this document as
Pool). Pool is a social networking site that is produced by the ABC in
conjunction with a social media community comprising professional
and non-professional media makers and educators.
As an entity the research commissioned by the ABC into the Pool is
greater than the concerns or scope of my doctorate. I have however,
used my role as a co-leader of research team within the project as the
key site for my own doctoral investigation.
Pool represents a new form of co-creative space. In my analysis I
identify and discuss those insights and findings that are pertinent to
this doctoral study. In this research I was able to identify two ways in
which a contemporary publication designer is able to engage with, and
in, a co-creative situation. The first is the design of co-creative spaces
as publications; the second is working co-creatively with the audience. I
examine the contexts and implications of these options in Chapter Five.

RESEARCH APPROACH

LITERATURE ON DESIGN, RESEARCH AND REFLECTION

I began this research with an investigation into design and practice

research methodologies, using the following texts: Peter Downton’s
Design Research (2005); Donald Schön’s Reflective Practitioner (1991); and
Henrik Gedenryd’s How Designers Work (1998).
As this study explored the transformation in the practice of

18 CO-CREATIVE PUBLICS AND PUBLICATION DESIGN PRACTICE

publication design, It was necessary to consider what a practice is,
and how it relates to research. The authors listed above dismiss the
notion that practice is merely the application of verifiable scientific
knowledge using a collection of techniques and skills in a predictable
and systematic way. That approach was characterised as technical
rationality, or a design methods approach. Design writer, Donald
Schön (1991), for example, makes the point that this concept of
practice orientates it as a problem solving process, which assumes that
the problems are well defined. Yet as he notes:

Increasingly we have become aware of the importance to actual

practice of phenomena—complexity, uncertainty, instability,
uniqueness, and value-conflict—which do not fit the model of
Technical Rationality (1991: 39)

In fact, for Schön, designing is a process initially oriented towards

setting, or defining, the problem; combined with using the tacit
knowledge of the practitioner; and achieved by knowing-in-action. For
Schön design practice is an activity that constructs knowledge as it is
being performed. The knowledge can be retrieved through reflection,
both at the time of performance (in action) and later (on action). Further,
the practice is open to unexpected conditions, wherein a surprise
observation can alert the practitioner to new knowledge found in the
situation (1991: 56). The practitioner, he notes: “shapes the situation, in
accordance with his initial appreciation of it, the situation ‘talks back’,
and he responds to the situation’s back-talk” (1991: 79). Practice and
research are therefore closely linked in this scenario as the practitioner
moves from constructing knowledge to making sense of it and then
communicating the knowledge via the artefact or through discourse.
Peter Downton in his book, Design Research, expands on the idea that
knowledge is an outcome of design practice. Downton articulates three
modes of research associated with design practice: research for; about;

CO-CREATIVE PUBLICS AND PUBLICATION DESIGN PRACTICE 19

 and through design (Downton 2005: 2). These terms are adopted from
Christopher Frayling’s writing about research in art and design (Frayling
2004).
Of these, ‘research about design’ deals with what designers do when
designing, incorporating a process of making and thinking (Downton
2005: 35). Practice, in this case, denotes the way a designer moves
through a process of inquiry by building, identifying and accumulating
knowledge, which may be stored and transmitted in design objects.
Downton notes that designers cannot ‘intentionally and unequivocally
embody whatever knowledge they wish to in any work and do so in a way
that is clear to at least some others’ (2005: 106). However, a designer
can articulate his or her intention and communicate this to the receiver,
making it possible for the receiver to extract the knowledge from the
artefact (and construct his or her own meaning from it).
In his Ph.D. in cognitive science, How Designers Work: Making Sense of
Authentic Cognitive Activity, Henrik Gedenryd asserts that the interaction
that occurs through the making process, produces cognition that while
different to, is the equivalent of conventional forms of knowledge
building. He defines practice therefore as interaction cognition. Like
Downton, Gedenryd sees practice as a dynamic and generative activity,
which goes beyond an instrumental routine.
Based on these perspectives, I have constructed the following
working definition of practice for this study as: a set of relationships
between people, and between people and things, which are bounded by
a situation, through which ideas are made manifest into artefacts.
These artefacts can be the inquiring materials—moodboard, sketch,
design rough, persona cards (Gedenryd 1998), as well as the final design
artefact. Knowledge is generated through the process of making and
can be retrieved through reflection and by ‘reading’ the artefacts that are
created. This definition points to the method I have used in this study: to
view and analyse practice both close up and from a critical distance.

20 CO-CREATIVE PUBLICS AND PUBLICATION DESIGN PRACTICE

A THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK

As my inquiry progressed, I constructed a theoretical framework for

this study, which I discuss in Chapter 2: Two Views on the Research. These
views emphasise communication; the public and social nature of
design; and an orientation towards audience participation in design.
As this research has been undertaken through practice which is
by nature messy and often undefined, I acknowledge that while the
research discoveries are presented sequentially here, they were in fact
occurring iteratively at different times during the life of the study.
Ideas would form and coalesce around certain activities, then recur in
another later activity in a different form.
One task in this text has been to trace the threads of these ideas
and to bring them together, with their relationship to the practice that
prompted them still intact, whilst at the same time connecting the
ideas into a coherent argument. One pleasure in the approach is seeing
and experiencing ideas manifest in both physical and cogitative forms,
which drove this study to completion.

PUBLICATION DESIGN AS MEDIA

The theoretical framework developed for this research is grounded in

a deliberate re-positioning of publication design as a part of the full
spectrum of the media, rather than situated as a stand-alone discipline in
the field of design. This move is based on the following premises, with a
particular emphasis on the orientation towards the audience:

1. Situated within the broader field of communication design,

publication design performs the same function as mainstream
media, or what we know as the media (the industrial production
of newspapers, television and so on). That is, publication design
carries and promotes values, arguments, beliefs, differences,
thoughts and stories, and in turn influences public opinion;

CO-CREATIVE PUBLICS AND PUBLICATION DESIGN PRACTICE 21

 2. The audience (publics) for the media, including publication design,
is changing how it behaves in relationship to the media it consumes;
in its expectations of participation and engagement with the media;
its critical appreciation of, and literacy in the modes of media
production; and how it understands and relates to media.
Situating publication design within the media allows me to reflect
on publication design from a different perspective, one that includes
its impact on the reader and society, which is crucial in this study.
I acknowledge that while drawing on another discipline can provide
new insights, it can also be problematic. It can lead to a superficial
reading and may miss what is implicit in that discipline, yet this
practice of gleaning references is implicit to the practice of design.
Ideas, entities, vistas or conversations, are used by the designer to
reposition or critique an aspect of design. I have understood the
possible limitations of this in the research, yet have also found it to be
essential to the research exploration.
These writings from new fields have provided a lens that I did not find
in the design discourse that I surveyed. In media studies I found writings
on the concepts of the public sphere and publics that were to prove
foundational to the investigation. These concepts opened up alternative
ways to conceptualise the way communication moves throughout society.
The two views I construct as perspectives on the research are: Design
Conversation and Co-creative Publics. They represent two stages in
the study, from an internal focus on the design process and then a
reorientation towards the audience. I briefly summarise each concept
here, and expand on them in the following chapter.

COMMUNICATION: THE DESIGN CONVERSATION

Publication Design is a mode or medium of communication that

shares similar dynamics to those that occur in a conversation. A
conversational prompt is made when a work is published and to a

22 CO-CREATIVE PUBLICS AND PUBLICATION DESIGN PRACTICE

certain extent, a dialogue is established with its audience.
However, in typical design practice, the ‘feedback loop’ returning
from the audience to the designer is not well developed and the
communication flow is impeded. There are few ways for the feedback
loop to occur. If it does happen it is dependant on the client and their
openness to criticism; the type of design artefact and its ability to
capture feedback (such as a social media site); or the market context of
the design outcome.
In this research I identify the site of this impediment as being one
of the central design problems, or research questions, in the study.
To address these problems I then posed the question: what exists in
design practice that could be used to remove the impediment and free
up the communication flow in both directions?
My instinct at the beginning of the study was to propose that the
form of the conversation used within the design process is purposeful
and well designed, and could contain the answer to the question that I
posed. The term ‘design conversation’ used in this study encapsulates
a set of communicative instances (conversations) that are found
within the design-making process. That is, conversations between
the designer and client, design project workers, other stakeholders,
suppliers and to some extent the audience (or a segment of the
audience such as a focus group used for testing a design outcome).
In this formative stage of the research I identified three key
characteristics of conversation that give an insight into what occurs in
the design conversation. They are dissonance: which acknowledges
the existing ability of design to manage various voices; dialogic: where
the conversation within one instance of a design project connects to
conversations in other past and concurrent design projects; and listening:
which completes the conversational loop by including interlocutors.
From these characteristics I conclude that the design conversation is
a mechanism that can be utilised to effectively bring in voices that are

CO-CREATIVE PUBLICS AND PUBLICATION DESIGN PRACTICE 23

 external to the design process, namely the audience. I use the writings of
Andy Dong and Ranulph Glanville to explore the act of communication
and specifically what role it performs in publication design.

THE PUBLIC NATURE OF DESIGN: THE PUBLIC SPHERE, PUBLICS AND

CO-CREATIVE PUBLICS

During the second stage of the research I turned my attention to the

audience. As an interlocutor in the design conversation, the audience
becomes the loci of this investigation.
At this point, I developed a series of questions to help me identify
and describe the audience for design, and to consider the influence
this group has or could have on the performance of publication design.
How can we understand the audience for design? What are their
expectations about their relationship to design? What is their literacy
of design and how does this impact the practice? How involved does
this audience want to be or can they be in the process? And how can
we describe the social formation of people into an audience for an
instance of design, such as an artefact or event?
To answer these questions I began by looking at the context that an
audience exists within. I refered to social theorist Jürgen Habermas’
concept of the Public Sphere (1974), and follow up by using an
exploration of the nature of discrete publics that form around design,
referred to here as a public.
In this research I use the features of the public sphere as a way to
describe the situation that design encounters once it enters the world.
The concept of the public sphere is also useful to use in imagining the
virtual public domain of the internet and social media, which I draw on
specifically in the section on Pool.
From the literature on the broad public sphere, I progress to Michael
Warner’s description of a public, which defines a specific public in
contrast to the amorphous public that exists in the public sphere. A

24 CO-CREATIVE PUBLICS AND PUBLICATION DESIGN PRACTICE

public is a specific instance of a social arrangement of people who
share an interest in something.
In this study I look at what happens when a public forms around a
publication design artefact. This public can remain as ‘strangers’ to
each other, while at the same time engaging in a ‘reflexive discourse’.
Warner enumerates seven characteristics of a public as:

self-organized; a relation among strangers; where the address of

public speech is both personal and impersonal; it is constituted
through mere attention; is the social space created by the reflexive
circulation of discourse; acts historically according to the temporality
of their circulation; and is poetic world-making (2002: 62).

Warner emphasises that: ‘a public is the social space created by the

reflexive circulation of discourse’ (2002: 62). A public can exist within
this discourse and be identified by its relationship to the polemic or
conversation.
I use the notion of a public, created and existing within discourse,
to delineate the type of co-creative audience for design that I put
forward in this text. In this I am not arguing that a member of a public
necessarily becomes a direct participant in the physical making of a
design artefact. Rather, that their participation can be to engage in
the design conversation (or discourse) around design. In turn this
discursive input effects change in the outcome.
This is a key finding of the research and my proposed
reconceptualisation of the practice of publication design and the acts
of co-creation. I will expand on the ways this could happen in practice
in the Conclusion.

Audience and designer as co-creators

In its modern usage, co-creation is a term used in the Open Source
movement in the early part of this century. The term describes a

CO-CREATIVE PUBLICS AND PUBLICATION DESIGN PRACTICE 25

 relationship that is both autonomous and collaborative. David Bollier
discusses the ethos of the Open Source movement in his book Viral
Spiral (2008). For him in an open source model, a person or group
initiates a project, generates programming code, and then shares
this source code with others who are external to the core group.
Contributors are encouraged to add, edit or delete from the code to
create new programs or enhanced functions. The initiators of a project
offer the source material free of obligation, other than on the condition
that any development is handed back to the community on terms set
out in the agreement; Co-creators self-elect to enter this agreement and
work autonomously with the source material. The agreement does not
oblige the participant to contribute or to continue their engagement.
He or she does so out of their own volition.
It is these characteristics—autonomy, volition, self-organisation and
agreement—that distinguish co-creation from the type of collaboration
that occurs as a result of being part of a pre-established community
or belief system. This difference of how we understand, enable and
experience creating with others, is the bridge between the three
case studies of the research and fundamental to this new practice of
publication design.

CONTRIBUTION TO DESIGN RESEARCH

The contribution that I set out to make in this study was to research
the discursive relationship between a designer and the audience of the
publication design they create. As such the study draws attention to
the situation where a design artefact enters the world and encounters a
public (the audience).
I argue that it is at this site that a significant change in the
relationship between designer and audience is occurring. This is a
change that will have an impact on the way a designer performs their
role in the future.

26 CO-CREATIVE PUBLICS AND PUBLICATION DESIGN PRACTICE

 I frame the change as a move to a co-creative situation. This involves
both designer and audience participating in an open and expanded
design conversation, which draws on a facility to incorporate multiple
voices (dissonance) and refer to other situations (dialogic). In Chapter
2, I construct a typology of this co-creativity using theories around
communication, the public sphere, publics and participatory culture.
In the study I identified a gap in design literature covering this field
of practice. Many design writers refer to the social and discursive
nature within the design process (Lloyd 2000; Dong 2009), and the
impact that design has on the world (Norman 2002). Others, such as
Schön, Downton and Gedenryd articulate how knowledge is formed
through the combination of making and reflection. Whilst another
view on the materiality of design is provided by Carter (2004), de
Freitas (2008) and de Bretteville (1999). The publication design as
artefact is addressed by writers such as Heller (2003).
Yet in my survey I found little focus on the relationship between the
designer and audience in the practice of making. To locate this type
of literature I turned to media studies and social cultural theory to
describe and explain this relationship.
By accessing literature from other disciplines I have made a case for
re-positioning publication design practice as one that is a discursive
act of co-creation, which is orientated towards the audience. This is in
contrast to the conventional orientation towards the artefact.
In this doctoral research I offer a different perspective on
publication design as a constituent of the broad media array. By doing
so I am able to bring a range of theoretical positions, such as those in
media and cultural studies, to the study of the relationship between
publication design, the designer and the audience.

CO-CREATIVE PUBLICS AND PUBLICATION DESIGN PRACTICE 27

 STRUCTURE OF THE DURABLE VISUAL RECORD

This document is one part of a three part durable record of the PhD
study: Co-creative Publics: Publication Design. The other elements in
the submission are the documented exhibition and presentation.
This exegesis comprises a theoretical framing chapter, Two views
on the research; three case studies of the core projects within the
study; and the Conclusion. In Two views on the research I develop the
argument with reference to the literature that supported my thinking
throughout the study.
In the first case study I review the initial project Design Audio Cloud.
The second is a critical reflection on my experience of working in print
and publishing collectives, Backyard Press and Champion Books. The
third case study is a report an analysis of the major research project,
ABC Pool research and redesign project.
I conclude with a synthesis of the themes that emerged in the study
and resolve the key research questions. In addition I describe two
ways in which a publication design practitioner could engage with a
co-creative public. Finally I deduce that the context that I describe in
the study produces a discourse based, co-creative, publication design
practice.

28 CO-CREATIVE PUBLICS AND PUBLICATION DESIGN PRACTICE

CO-CREATIVE PUBLICS AND PUBLICATION DESIGN PRACTICE 29
 TWO VIEWS ON THE RESEARCH
DESIGN CONVERSATION

CO-CREATIVE PUBLICS

30 CO-CREATIVE PUBLICS AND PUBLICATION DESIGN PRACTICE

As the research projects evolved and I critically reflected on
the issues and challenges that were emerging I realised that
there were two distinct themes of discovery forming: the
Design Conversation and Co-creative Publics. Each view stresses
the communicative nature of publication design. For each
of these views, I draw on literature from design, media
and cultural studies in order to expand the conceptual
framework of the research and practice.

I used these viewpoints through which to critique the case study

material. The views also form a theoretical framework to analyse the
overarching doctoral research, which considers the changing agency of
the designer in the relationship between designer and audience when
performed within a co-creative situation.
The view in the Design Conversation is internally oriented, focusing on the
design process. It explores existing design practices, such as generating an
idea, prototyping and developing the concept and negotiating design ideas
within the making phase of design.
The view in the Co-creative Publics, orients outwardly towards the
audience, and in particular a co-creative audience that is both design
literate and participatory.

CO-CREATIVE PUBLICS AND PUBLICATION DESIGN PRACTICE 31

 THE DESIGN CONVERSATION

At the outset of the study I felt that there was something inherent in
existing design practice that could be a key to how designers and the
audience could adapt to a different type of relationship in the practices
and processes of design. In order to capture the discursive nature of
communication design, I compress design practice into what I call a
design conversation.
This conversation begins when a design project is initiated. It occurs
in the design-making stage, up to the point where the design artefact
materialises and is brought to the attention of a public.
The term, design conversation, conflates all the conversations held
in the course of a conventional design commission. This includes the
conversations that take place between the client and the designer;
the designers and others within the design team; the designers and
outside service providers (such as illustrators, photographers, editors
and writers) and whatever occurs with the audience before or after the
artefact is produced.
The design conversation also incorporates the various means and
media that designers use to conduct the conversation. These include
meetings, presentations, phone calls, emails and web communication,
process documentation (such as a brief, return brief, and purchase
order), design roughs, moodboards, and so on.
As Donald Schön notes, designers ‘engage in a conversation with
the situation they are shaping’ (1991: 79). The design situation forms
around the activity, and is bounded by the conditions of that activity,
namely the people involved; the context it sits within; and what is to be
communicated (in the case of publication design).

32 CO-CREATIVE PUBLICS AND PUBLICATION DESIGN PRACTICE

 Schön’s observation highlights conversation as a creative and
influential factor that determines how the design situation is formed.
The conversation is not simply an adjunct to, or explanation of, the
situation. Schön (1991: 79) goes further to include the notion of
backtalk, which implies a response from the situation and materials
that the designer works with. As design theorist Cameron Tonkinwise,
speaking about backtalk, notes:

though [design] tends to happen in fits and starts, when it does

happen designing moves quickly and with a surety because
the design is itself a partner in the process, dialoguing with
the designer, helping to articulate what the design should be
(Tonkinwise 2007: lecture).

Thus the designer, the designing (the process of making), and the
design situation, are in an authentic and reciprocal relationship, which
embodies a level of confidence (surety) based on how the dialogue is
conducted.
Various political and power agendas exist within a design situation.
However, it was not in the scope of this study to address those agendas
in depth. The design conversation represents the language used in the
design situation and how it influences the design activity. Theorist,
Andy Dong (2006) asks the question:

If language metonymically refers to design by intertwining with

designers in an ontological circuit that harnesses and represents that
which can be conversed and said, does language itself participate in
the enactment of design? (2006: 5).

For if language and design stand for each other, metonymically, in

the design situation, then design can be seen as a language, and the
design artefact can be seen as one of the media through which the

CO-CREATIVE PUBLICS AND PUBLICATION DESIGN PRACTICE 33

 conversation is held. As well, I suggest, the artefact is a publication.
This is a manifestation of what Dong calls ‘the harnessing and
representation’ (2006: 5) of the conversation between a designer and
his or her situation. Dong alludes to this, as the performative nature of
design, which:

enacts design through: (1) aggregation -– to blend ideas and

concepts; (2) accumulation – to scaffold ideas and concepts; and (3)
appraisal – to evaluate and assess ideas and concepts. Through these
performative aspects, the language of design enacts design and
actualizes the designed work (Dong 2006: 6).

This is a useful description of the procedural infrastructure that

supports the design conversation. The statement makes sense of the
progress from ideas through to prototyping and finally to evaluation of
the ‘actualized work’ or design artefact. In a sense, the conversation is
the grammar of the process.
However, while this description outlines the structure, it does not tell
what ‘goes on’ in the design conversation. For this, I look to two concepts
that come from outside the design discipline, namely dissonance and
dialogic. These terms, I believe, give some sense of the character of the
design conversation, which has a type of unruly communication flow. The
concepts suggest energies that a) drive the conversation (dissonance) and
b) link it to other conversations and situations (dialogic).
The sketch of the design conversation (opposite) suggests
a tangle of various stakeholders, material and informational
inputs and a number of outcomes that are generated in the design
conversation. The drawing contains open and closed circles to
indicate conversations, which reach a conclusion, and those that are
still open (Glanville 1996). It attempts to show the interrelatedness
of the sub-conversations to each other, and to the overarching design
conversation.

34 CO-CREATIVE PUBLICS AND PUBLICATION DESIGN PRACTICE

 DESIGN CONVERSATION
INPUTS OUTPUTS
Client/ Multiple voices
commission agent

Research

Design team Artefact

Service providers

Knowledge
Research

DISSONANCE

The design conversation is a multi-vocal, dissonant space, comprising

multiple participants, many inputs and several outputs, including, but
not limited to, the artefact. Dissonance (in music) is defined as: the
quality of sounds, which seems unstable and has an aural need to resolve
to a stable consonance. Musicologist, Roger Kamien describes it thus:

An unstable tone combination is a dissonance; its tension demands

an onward motion to a stable chord. Thus dissonant chords are
‘active’ (Kamien 2008: 41)

The urge to find consonance in a music composition may or may

not be satisfied, but importantly it establishes a drive towards a stable
outcome. The drive to find consonance in a composition is analogous
to what happens in a design commission where multiple stakeholders
and participants input into the process at various points.

CO-CREATIVE PUBLICS AND PUBLICATION DESIGN PRACTICE 35

 Often the sub-conversations between a designer and the
stakeholders that occur within a design context are contradictory or
conflicting. As a practical example: a client might specify in the design
brief that she wants a brochure, whereas the designer might conclude
that a website is a better solution to reach the client’s audience (or
vice versa). Thus these differing expectations establish a point of
negotiation between the two conflicting intentions.
As one purpose of the design conversation is to move the project
forward from idea or desire to the formation of an artefact that reflects,
as near as possible, a stable agreement between various stakeholders.
An agreement might be made on the communication strategy, the look
and feel of the artefact, media selection, material form, cost and so
on. Yet it is also possible that the conversation is left unresolved and
misunderstandings remain.

SURPRISE

Deliberating on the design conversation led me to the theories of

Cybernetics, which include studies of conversations and how they work.
Cybernetic theorist Ranulph Glanville (1996), for example, contends that
a conversation aims to cycle through a number of misunderstandings
to progressively limit misinterpretation of each interlocutor’s point of
view. It is through this process that a genuine understanding between
the conversers is reached. In Glanville’s view the agreement is to accept
some level of misunderstanding, which itself produces understanding.
Misunderstanding, or possibly more accurately, the agreement
to allow misunderstanding, would seem to contradict common
assumptions about communication. However, as Glanville notes,
reaching this agreement (an agreement to not reach perfect agreement)
can build a situation where surprise and novel outcomes are valued. In
his view, misunderstanding is not only inevitable, but:

36 CO-CREATIVE PUBLICS AND PUBLICATION DESIGN PRACTICE

 …a benefit: for it permits the conversation to move on, ‘of its own
accord’, due to the interaction of the two participants. Thus it gives
the representer a surprise—something new (Glanville 1996: 11).

Glanville extends his exploration of the serendipitous nature of

conversations in terms of novelty (the surprise), which he claims is a
‘familiar feature of conversation…we find we are talking about new
topics, and even exploring and expressing completely new meanings’
(1996: 10).
There is an echo here, as well, of the notion of backtalk, as described
by Tonkinwise (2007), where design is a partner or interlocutor in the
dialogue. Surprise and novelty can come into the design conversation
as misunderstandings produce new topics and work to create new
meanings. Thus the slippage between the intention of one interlocutor,
and the interpretation by another, can produce innovation.

INTENTION AND MEANING

There is debate in the literature over where meaning resides in design.

Design writers Nathan Crilly et. al. (2008: 434), in the article Design
as communication: exploring the validity and utility of relating intention to
interpretation, identify two sides of the debate. One view claims the
designer’s intention produces meaning, which is then transmitted to
the audience via the design artefact. The other states that the recipient,
through inference and interpretation, creates meaning.

Glanville takes the view that meaning is not contained within

utterances, pictures, behaviour or any other such devices of
communication…but it is constructed by each individual involved in
an act of communication (Glanville 1996: 442).

That is, both the representer and the representee (sender and
receiver) come together to reach agreement, as much as it is possible,

CO-CREATIVE PUBLICS AND PUBLICATION DESIGN PRACTICE 37

 on the intended meaning. Communication, then, is not the result, but
the process of reaching agreement.
Crilly goes further to say that both the designer and recipient
make some inference on the intention of the designer as to how the
artefact is required to operate. The designer will, for example, infer
some characteristics of the recipient (for example their age or social
situation), and the recipient may infer the general purpose of the
artefact. Crilly notes:

By adopting what the philosopher, Daniel Dennet terms ‘the design

stance’, people can conceptualise the operations of products and
interact with them more efficiently…therefore the inference of
design intent aids comprehension of the system (2008: 441).

In addition, Crilly discusses the view that, due to the distance

between the designer and the recipient, the artefact, when it enters the
world becomes part of the:

process of mediated communication, where the intentions of

the designer for how the product should be interpreted inform
the production of the mediating artefact that is presented to the
consumer (2008: 429).

In this study I take the position that each of the participants—

the designer and the recipient—construct meaning, in most cases,
independently of each other. Yet it is through the interplay between
each, that meaning is in this case socially constructed. It is also likely
that the intention of the designer will influence the interpretation by
the recipient, who to some degree infers that intention. In essence,
meaning is a process of exchange between the designer and the
recipient. The medium and how the text (artefact) is constructed will
influence the ‘reading’ (interpretation) of the intention. Further, that
context, as Bakhtin claims, has primacy over text (Bakhtin 1981: 428

38 CO-CREATIVE PUBLICS AND PUBLICATION DESIGN PRACTICE

Glossary). Therefore in order to study communication, it is necessary
to understand the way context influences meaning:

At any given time, in any given place, there will be a set of conditions—
social, historical, metrological, physiological—that insures that a word
uttered in that place and at that time will have a meaning different than
it would under any other conditions (Bakhtin 1981: 428)

Returning to the discussion of the design conversation, it is then

possible to view the design conversation as a set of communicative
relationships, situated within a context.
In addition to the internal impulses that drive it, the design
conversation is also influenced by sources that are external to the
immediate making-process. These include design research, design
discourse, contemporary stylistics and the dialogic conditions of
design. These inputs coalesce in the formation of the design artefact.
However, the artefact is not the only outcome of the design
conversation. Other outcomes may include research knowledge
(Gedenryd 1998; Downton 2005), innovations that occur during the
design process (Schrage 2000) and stylistic breakthroughs that emerge
from innovation and experimentation (Buchanan 1995).
The momentum to find a stable outcome drives the conversations
towards an end point. The design artefact is stable in the sense that
it forms an object, which enters the world of objects. So, while an
absolute agreement might not be reached, a point in time is marked
and the design solution becomes fixed as an artefact.
This also marks the end of the formative design conversation and
the place at which the artefact becomes a part of a larger conversation.
Once the artefact enters the world it is propelled into a new
conversation with diverse audiences and is situated in the broad and
ongoing design discourse. This study is primarily concerned with this
later stage of the design conversation.

CO-CREATIVE PUBLICS AND PUBLICATION DESIGN PRACTICE 39

 DIALOGIC

As the artefact is forming, and later when it enters the world, the
artefact becomes part of a dialogic conversation that links it to other
instances of design. It is the dialogic linkage between disparate
conversations and artefacts that I look at now.
Dialogic is a concept put forward by Mikhail Bakhtin (1981) to
explain how one creative work can be in conversation with another.
Bakhtin’s field is literary criticism, specifically about the novel as a
unique literary form. He uses dialogic in the entomological, Greek
sense of ‘through words’ (dia – through, logos – words) rather than
the common usage as ‘between two’. I transpose words with text in this
study to include a design artefact as a text, which shares a relationship
with other design artefacts.
The dialogic here represents how one text will influence the reading
of another and reciprocally, will be influenced by the dialogue that exists
between them. In other words, a design artefact or conversation exists in
a world of other artefacts and conversations, which affect each other.
For example, how we now see an artefact that was produced in the
20th century is affected by the visual culture we live in. Equally, the
way we read a contemporary artefact can be changed when we see
something from the past that resonates with it. There is an interplay
going on between these two situations, which can be identified and
used to explore the dialogue that exists between them.

NETWORKS OF ARTEFACTS AND CONVERSATIONS

The term dialogic also brings into play the idea of interconnectedness
between artefacts and conversations. Network theory offers a
constructive viewpoint to understand these connections and how they fit
into the world of the artefact. In Linked: The New Science of Networks, author
Albert-Laszlo Barabasi (2003), outlines how networks form and operate:

40 CO-CREATIVE PUBLICS AND PUBLICATION DESIGN PRACTICE

 when you add enough links such that each node has an average of
one link, a miracle happens: A unique giant cluster emerges. That
is, most nodes will be part of a single cluster, such that, starting
from any node, we can get to any other by navigating along the links
between the nodes (2003: 18).

In this way the concept of the dialogic can be seen as a linking

device, which creates clusters of design ideas and influences. While
each design conversation is discrete and singular, it is linked to others.
This creates the broader design discourse.
Barabasi also notes that: ‘networks are governed by two laws: growth
and preferential attachment’ (2003: 86). That is, that networks have a
tendency to grow in scale, which is achieved by linking to other nodes;
and that they prefer to link to nodes that have the most existing links.
This, I believe, helps to explain the way ideas, styles and approaches
move across periods in design. A design idea, for example, will seek to
grow by linking to other instances of the same or similar idea. It can do
this over time and geographical space.
Take, for example, the idea of participation and how it iterates
throughout the history of publication design. In Paris, May 1968, the Atelier
Populare (Popular Workshop) was formed to support the student protests
against what was perceived as an authoritarian, French Government. The
workshop printed street posters with titles such as: A Youth Disturbed Too
Often By The Future; Yes To Occupied Factories!; Reforms – Chloroform; and Free
Press (Rohan 1988). Students and others designed the posters at the Ecole
des Beaux Arts, where the Atelier was located. The posters represent the
publication of ideas from a spontaneous and mass public action.
This instance links dialogically to the revolutionary movement in
1917 Soviet Russia when activists published posters and pamphlets
provoking rebellion. While not the same aesthetic, the posters share an
immediacy and collective production method.

CO-CREATIVE PUBLICS AND PUBLICATION DESIGN PRACTICE 41

 Arguably this instance also links forward, for example, to the
IndyPress movement around globalization in the 1990s comprising
online ‘citizen journalism’. In the Indymedia case the medium
is different from the print media of Paris 68 or Soviet Russia.
Nonetheless, in each case these activists are motivated to produce
media collectively by a desire to communicate their cause.
These publications are dialogically linked through the ideas they
represent as well as by the participatory nature of this type of design.
Each instance influences the way we read the other. Thus, the printed
works of the soviet constructivists can be perceived differently in the
context of the electronic outcomes of Indymedia.
I use the characteristics of dissonance and dialogic to indicate points
within the design process that demonstrate how the process can be
opened to other participants. As these characteristics already exist in
design it is possible to imagine them being used to include larger co-
creative audiences.

LISTENING

Listening is an everyday occurrence that is normalized to the point it

is often difficult to extricate it as a discrete practice. Andrew Wolvin
(2010), in his book Listening and Human Communication in the 21st
Century notes: ‘Unfortunately listening has come to be viewed, at least
in American society as a passive, simple act that we just do’ (2010: 1).
Nonetheless several disciplines study the act and practice of listening,
such as cultural studies, psychology, and interaction-and participatory-
design. Listening is also emerging as an interest in social media
discourse as new networking practices develop.
I speculate that as the audience becomes co-creative, it is imperative
that the listening practices of designers are attuned towards the
audience. This sets up a new context for listening to be explored and
examined and potentially enhanced.

42 CO-CREATIVE PUBLICS AND PUBLICATION DESIGN PRACTICE

LISTENING IN PUBLICATION DESIGN

Publication designers spend a considerable amount of time ‘in

conversation’ with a range of stakeholders. The act of listening,
through which we aim to develop common understanding and
meaning, is implicit in the literature on communication in design.
Listening is both the reception of the message from the sender
(Crilly 2008), as well as a means to process the message (Gedenryd
1998). By listening, the recipient receives the message, interprets and
constructs meaning from it.
It can be argued that designers have developed a ‘discipline-specific’
way of listening, using a range of methods to pose questions and
listen to and process the responses. These methods include: sketches,
design roughs, models, prototypes, personas cards and scenarios,
the studio display wall, unfinished models as well as points in the
process to approve proofs of the work. This listening process was used
comprehensibly in the Pool research, outlined in Chapter 5. ABC Pool
research and redesign project.
The methods, mentioned above, are used to put forward ideas in a
non-committed way; to check that the general direction is agreed to;
and to provide an opportunity for input into the design process from
those outside of it. In effect, these artefacts become prompts, which
ask specific questions of others in the process and in turn require the
designer to process the feedback.
The question could be, for example: does this prototype contain the
requisite level of sophistication to engage the specific audience; or, has
the material on the wall captured the essential elements of the design
situation to allow us to proceed?

LISTENING THROUGH INTERACTION

In his thesis How Designers Work, Henrik Gedenryd (1998) explores

interaction cognition; a term he uses to describe cognition that comes

CO-CREATIVE PUBLICS AND PUBLICATION DESIGN PRACTICE 43

 during and after making something such as a design. Gedenryd
counterpoints this with the normative view where thinking takes
place in the mind and through words, which he terms intramentality.
Sketches, thumbnails and design roughs, for example, become
‘inquiring materials’ in his depiction of interaction cognition.
Cognitive understanding is produced through the process of
making, or by working with the materials and paying attention to the
feedback that these artefacts induce. Gedenryd further describes the
extensive, reciprocal relationship that develops through the process:

In interactive cognition the cognising individual, on the one hand,

and the world on the other, reciprocally influence each other. In
other words, mind and world interactively determine each other,
and particularly, they interactively determine cognitive performance
(Gedenryd 1998: 111).

The interaction cognition that Gedenryd describes can, I believe,

help explain the nature of design listening, which can be thought
of as listening-through-interaction. The artefacts and activities that
designers employ through the design process are useful in creating
understanding and identifying misunderstanding.
Sketching, moodboards and other devices intentionally open up
an opportunity to listen and to provoke novel ideas. A moodboard,
for example, is created in the early stage of the design process. It is
similar to a sketch and used to stimulate discussion around an idea,
putting forward a suggestion rather than proposing a solution. Often it
addresses intangibles, such as the way a design might feel, or literally
the mood that the piece could evoke.
Design author Remko van der Lugt put it this way: ‘By sketching,
temporal decisions are made which allow for evaluation and
interpretation of a design solution, without excluding alternatives.’
(van der Lugt 2005: 107). The sketch allows both the designer and

44 CO-CREATIVE PUBLICS AND PUBLICATION DESIGN PRACTICE

recipient to consider an idea and cycle through various interpretations
until some agreement is reached.
Michael Schrage, who writes on collaborative practices, describes a
similar design tactic he calls the ‘unfinished model’ that deliberately
leaves certain aspects of the solution incomplete so that: ‘others in the
process can have input into the result’ (Schrage 1995). It is designed to
recruit others to develop a complete solution.
Listening in publication design is conventionally orientated towards
the client and other designers and service providers involved in the
design commission. A formal structure, along the lines of the one put
forward by Andy Dong of accumulation, aggregation, and appraisal
(Dong 2006: 6) has been developed to manage the process. Initially,
the designer together with a commissioning agent (client) establishes
a direction for the project to take.
In the accumulation stage some, or all, of the ‘inquiring materials’
that Gedenryd describes are used (sketches, moodboard, persona
cards, and so on). This stage tends to be generative, cycling through
proposals and feedback until a concept is developed and a strategy is
negotiated to move the work ahead. Ideas and responses are pulled
together to shape the direction.
Once a direction has been decided upon, designers then move into
the production phase. This involves iterative points where listening
is utilized to check the progress of the work. There are benchmark
points, such as proofing sign-offs (signed agreement by the client
that the work can proceed to the next stage) and resource checks
(confirming the budget will cover the cost of production and so on).
The designer collects information and feedback and responds to the
circumstances as they develop.
The communication flow here is primarily linear, moving from
initiation to prototyping and on to final production. However
production time is set aside to cycle back through the process to

CO-CREATIVE PUBLICS AND PUBLICATION DESIGN PRACTICE 45

 correct any errors or omissions. A final prototype and ultimately the
design artefact are appraised against the criteria that was established at
the start.
The design process requires efficiency, and to some extent
expediency to complete the work within the project schedule and
budget constraints and is often accomplished with alacrity. Effective
listening is vital to achieving these ends in a commercial design
situation. These demands impel the designer to develop listening
techniques to pick up on the obvious messages as well as nuanced or
concealed messages and responses.
Through effective listening, designers can notice any points
of disagreement such as changes to the agreed brief (design
specifications) or pick up on any contentious issues between partners
that emerge during the process. With experience, some designers
become sensitive to intangible cues that indicate the way the concept is
being received or how the relationships between partners are working.
This is the evolving nature of communication expertise within a field of
practice by a practitioner.

ORIENTATING THE ACT OF LISTENING TOWARDS THE AUDIENCE

In this study I argue that publication designers can develop a more

direct conversation with their audiences and not just those who
commission the publication. The listening practices and interactive
methods described above can be considered as a key to the way the
conversation extends in this direction.
A number of questions emerged as I considered this re-orientation
towards the audience. What would happen if we introduced the
audience into the conversation? How would the introduction of a new
entity, into a closed ecology influence the known systems and actions
of the ecology members? Could the effect of new participants on the
ecology of the design conversation be disastrous?

46 CO-CREATIVE PUBLICS AND PUBLICATION DESIGN PRACTICE

 Certainly it is often challenging to take on the criticism of others
within the design conversation without adding to the difficulty through
the introduction of more participants. There are clear logistical reasons
for not inviting the audience to be part of the design process, such as
the time it would take to incorporate them. Efficiency can be lost if
this was to be seen simply as an extended consultation process. If the
audience is to be introduced into the design conversation, new ways of
working will be required.
Despite the logistical challenges, I believe there are two reasons,
which I outline below, why it is both necessary and valuable to include
the audience in this conversation.
Firstly, my research identifies that the distance between the designer
and the audience is diminishing. This is highlighted by the research
into Pool and is apparent in the way media is being produced and
consumed in the mainstream media context.
Publication designers now share their ‘tools of trade’ with a broad
public. Non-designers can now produce design outcomes using
computers and other digital technologies. This is creating a growing
literacy of design practices and techniques such as typography and
layout, and a sharing of technical design terms like font, grid, layers
and so on. Additionally, access to image capturing devices, such
as digital cameras as well as the software to manipulate images,
introduces a general public to techniques that was once the preserve of
professionals.
Media researcher, Jay Rosen, wryly describes some contemporary
publics as: ‘the people formerly known as the audience’ (Rosen 2008
blog entry, accessed 22/01/09) to indicate that some are also producers
(also know as prosumers: producer/consumer). The tension between
the new amateur (prosumer) and the professional helps to redefine
communication design. How that evolves is yet to be seen.

CO-CREATIVE PUBLICS AND PUBLICATION DESIGN PRACTICE 47

 The second reason for including the audience in the conversation
more fully is to take advantage of the potential to stimulate and
improve communication flow. Thus the design process becomes a
conduit both forward towards the initiator and backward from the
recipient. This sets up a new reciprocal relationship of initiating co-
creator/s and other co-creator/s, where the designer and audience are
able to share these roles. This new relationship requires removing
the impediment to the communication flow between designer and
audience.

48 CO-CREATIVE PUBLICS AND PUBLICATION DESIGN PRACTICE

CO-CREATIVE PUBLICS

The changing nature of the audience, characterised by an advanced

literacy of design and a greater expectation of being engaged co-
creatively is pivotal to the case I make for re-orientating the practice of
publication design. Indeed, the term ‘audience’ is now inadequate to
articulate the relationship this group has to design as it denotes passive
reception (viewer, listener, reader and so on). Whereas the relationship
I describe is driven by a shift in how communication flows and how
meaning is exchanged between the audience and design entities.
These entities are co-evolving, responding to each other and their
environment; and yet a distinction exists between the two despite the
blurring of some boundaries. In this section I seek to delineate the
difference, through a re-definintion of the audience by how it functions
in a public context. I look at the concepts the Public Sphere, publics (a
public), networked publics, and ultimately co-creative publics, as a way
to define this type of audience.

THE PUBLIC SPHERE

Jürgen Habermas initially put forward the concept of the ‘Public

Sphere’ in his work: The Public Sphere: An Encyclopedic Article (1974)
and later developed in the Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere:
an inquiry into a category of bourgeois society (1989). This is the public
sphere understood as the civic space of a literary, culture-debating
discourses, encapsulates the experience of modernity. The term refers
primarily to the development of the public life of private citizens as
society transformed from a feudal form into a bourgeois, industrialised
structure. The public sphere is used in contemporary academic

CO-CREATIVE PUBLICS AND PUBLICATION DESIGN PRACTICE 49

 literature to redefine the public space and now includes the online
public (Moulthorp 1994; Warner 2002; Ruiz 2009).
In the public sphere ‘conversation, reading and plain speech as
worthy forms of discourse’ operate to produce the then radical new
notion of public opinion (Habermas 1974). The public sphere and
public opinion variously formed the pre-condition for modernity, as
well as being modernity’s recursive effect.
The 18th c. industrial revolution, coupled with Enlightenment
thinking, unsettled the existing social order and feudal structures.
When the mode of production shifted from agrarian-based
communities to industrial urban centres an opportunity emerged for
people hitherto outside of the existing elite to participate in forming
opinions and making decisions. Public opinion, which aggregated
the thoughts and decisions made by the public, emerged as the space
where ideas were contested in the open. The conjuncture of new
thinking and new technologies produced alternative ways for people to
organize themselves.
The bourgeois, middle class, developed and moved into a position
of wealth and influence by building industry and employing people in
production. The socio-economic shift produced a fundamental shift
in social relations, which describes the shift from one social order to
another, involving politics, culture, social participation and influence.
As Habermas notes: ‘With the emergence of early finance and trade
capitalism, the elements of a new social order were taking shape’
(Habermas 1989: 14).
Habermas limited his study of the public sphere to the European
experience. The public sphere is further limited by the fact that
it acknowledged only the discourse that was based on property
ownership and literacy. Therefore, the public sphere excluded people
who were not property owners or literate, thus unable to voice their
opinions with authority. Public education was itself just emerging as

50 CO-CREATIVE PUBLICS AND PUBLICATION DESIGN PRACTICE

an aspect of public participation. Yet, while the concept of the public
sphere was not democratic in the sense of being fully inclusive, it did
expand the sphere of influence in society. It set the conditions for
modernity and all that subsequently encompassed.
Habermas traces the emergence of the public sphere through the
‘world of letters’ and the culture-debating discourse, both of which
are pertinent to this study. Habermas describes the emergence of
publications such as newsletters and journals as vehicles for public
discourse and information sharing and as items of exchange in
themselves. He also discusses the way these were transformed in the
19th century from arenas of culture debate and opinion forming modes
(Habermas 1989: 51, 159) into the comodification of knowledge for a
consumer audience (Habermas 1989: 169). I discuss these themes here.

EMERGENCE OF INFORMATION SHARING AND PUBLICATION

The shift in the ownership of productive capital and subsequent

social authority were the drivers of the social and political change that
produced the modern public sphere. In order for this to happen new
information channels were necessary, and the location of production
facilities and the flow of information between the drivers were
instrumental in this change. As Habermas states:

The great trade cities became at the same time centers for traffic in
news. The organization of this traffic on a continuous basis became
imperative to the degree to which the exchange of commodities
and of securities became continuous. Almost simultaneously with
the origin of stock markets, postal and the press institutionalized
regular contacts and communication (Habermas 1989: 16).

Paper and print technology serviced this imperative. Publication

technology and practices developed rapidly. Initially, hand-written
private correspondence that was the basis of the early industrial

CO-CREATIVE PUBLICS AND PUBLICATION DESIGN PRACTICE 51

 capitalist operations, contained reports of: ‘Imperial Diets, wars,
harvests, taxes, transport of precious metals, and, of course, reports
of foreign trade’ (Habermas 1989: 20). This became the foundation for
literary and trade journals, periodicals and newspapers. Through this
process, from hand-written private material to unit based news and
affairs information was transformed into a commodity, with its own
industrial basis and influence on the cultural transition. Consequently,
it became not merely a matter of efficiently moving news for the benefit
of the merchants.
The content of the publications was also in flux, as new types
of information emerged forging a new discourse in society. This
produced the conditions for the public sphere to expand into a
space for forming culture through debate and opinion. Initially the
merchants were the source of material:

the merchants were indispensable to the journals. They were

called custodies novellarum [custodian of the new] among their
contemporaries precisely because of this dependence of public
reporting upon their private exchange of news (Habermas 1989: 20).

As the exchange of information was converted into an industry in

its own right a number of changes followed that set the foundation
for both the publishing industry, and more broadly the public sharing
of information. I pose the following three reasons for why this is
significant for our conception of publics and publication.
Firstly, turning private correspondence to public news had the
effect of producing public commentators. That is, a private individual
could experience what ‘publicity’ (being public) meant by making and
sharing an opinion and thus joining in critical debate and opening
themselves to scrutiny. This experience, once it spread formed the
basis of public opinion as a critical expression of political and cultural
views. As Habermas argued:

52 CO-CREATIVE PUBLICS AND PUBLICATION DESIGN PRACTICE

 It provided a training ground for a critical public reflection
still preoccupied with itself—a process of self-clarification of
private people focusing on the genuine experiences of their novel
privateness (Habermas 1989: 29).

I return to this point in the Conclusion where I look at the similar

contemporary experience of expressing public views in the social
media space.
Secondly, over time, the experience of ‘publicity’ was shared by a
larger cohort in society:

scholars, doctors, pastors, officers, professors etc, rather than the

burghers, merchants, entrepreneurs were the real carrier of the
public, which from the outset was a reading public’ (Habermas
1989: 23).

Publicity later extended to trades people and retail owners and

others in the general public who were literate and able to contribute.
Thirdly, as an industry that over time became independent of the
owners of capital, publishing could build its own economy, by selling
its work to the literate public. This gave rise for the potential to employ
writers, editors and technology workers (printers in this case). It also
enabled the development of an independent sector of cultural and
political debate.
Each of these outcomes consolidated the public sphere into a critical
component of modernity, and drove the growth in rational and critical
thinking and expression which continues to transform over time.

FROM LITERARY PUBLIC SPHERE TO ADMINISTERED CONVERSATION

Despite the origins of the public sphere in the exchange of news and
information via newsletters and journals, according to Habermas at a
point in the nineteenth century the media itself became commodified

CO-CREATIVE PUBLICS AND PUBLICATION DESIGN PRACTICE 53

 (Habermas 1989: 160). While the ‘commercialization of cultural goods
had been the precondition for rational-critical debate’ (Habermas 1989:
164), these media, in fact, operated outside of the market. He cites a
number of causes of the change in the nature of the media. This ‘public
of private people’, lost its political character when the ‘rational-critical
debate of private people in salons, clubs and reading rooms’ was
drawn into the ‘cycle of production and consumption’ or ‘individuated
reception’ (Habermas 1989: 160). With this shift came a leveling of
the threshold between the world of letters and consumption. In other
words, the proprietors of the emergent media lowered the entrance
requirements for the consumption of their products, in order to
optimize the growing market. The rational discourse previousel
performed by the bourgeoisie became part of the function of the
media. This, Habermas claims, was accelerated with the introduction
of subsequent new media such as radio and film and television:

Today the conversation itself is administered. Professional dialogues

from the podium, panel discussions, and round table shows—the
rational debate of private people becomes one of the production
numbers of the stars in radio and television, a salable package …
(Habermas 1989: 164).

This was coupled with a level of penetration by the new media, to a

larger extent than was possible for the press, which changed the way
communication occurred. Debate and unmediated public opinion was
replaced by a type of entertainment, fashioned to appeal by offering
minimal challenge to the consumer.
It can be argued that Habermas’ view is not consistent with the
contemporary media literate contemporary audience, and may have
overstated the situation even at the time of writing. Nevertheless, I use
it in this study to mark a point where the public sphere underwent a
significant structural transformation. The sociability of the discursive

54 CO-CREATIVE PUBLICS AND PUBLICATION DESIGN PRACTICE

meeting place was replaced by a consumer culture, one where a
‘noncumulative experience goes together with the sociological
criterion of a destruction of the public sphere’ (Habermas 1989: 167).
The public sphere, in other words is sustained by an aggregation of
opinion and discourse, not by saleable experiences.
Writers, such as Pollyanna Ruiz (2009) introduce another dimension
into the debate about the public sphere. She argues that the modes
of communication in the concept of the public sphere should include
image and spectacle, which re-instates the concept of the public sphere
as a means to understand the social organisation of the modern.

VISUAL DISCOURSE AND THE PUBLIC SPHERE

Ruiz argues that Habermas based his concept almost entirely on verbal
discourse and the written word, and was hostile to the visual metaphor
in communication (Ruiz 2009: 104). The bias against the image was
evident in depictions of the early public sphere, and has only recently
been reconsidered. According to Ruiz, Habermas now accepts, albeit
grudgingly, the inclusion of ‘inclusive, and more or less discourse-
resembling communicative processes’ (Habermas, qtd Ruiz 2009: 105).
Visual historian, Barbara Stafford articulates how written and
spoken word is privileged as a consequence of the Enlightenment
suspicion of the image:

In order for text-based theories, systems and methods to become

autonomous referents, divorced from the sensory sphere above
which they floated, the matter and manner of vision had to be
demoted to intellectual nullity’ (Stafford 1996: 47).

The role of the image, as a ‘discourse-resembling communicative

action’, is important in the discussion of the contemporary
public sphere. It recognizes that certain types of imagery are an
‘untranslatable constructive form of cognition (expression), rather

CO-CREATIVE PUBLICS AND PUBLICATION DESIGN PRACTICE 55

 than equivalence (illustration)’ (Stafford 1996: 37). That is, that
imagery can express thought in a way that is different, but equal to
the written or spoken word. The re-integration of image and text thus
produces a richer public discourse by drawing on the communicative
qualities of each.
This re-integration also extends participation in the public sphere
to people who are visually rather than textually literate. While still
not satisfying the democratic vision of full social inclusion in the
public discourse, it does open opportunities that were not available
otherwise. The non-text literate person can participate via image-
making and image-reading. As well, the text literate person benefits
from the alternative communication that images offer. In my Masters
(Research) High Fidelity Image: tracing the emergence of a new constructed
image, 2004, I examined Stafford’s idea that the image is once again
finding equivalence with text. Over the past century the image has
begun to develop in the way that text developed under the aegis of
the Enlightenment. In that period of rationalism, text accelerated in
disciplines such as literature, law, medicine and science to articulate
the new thought precisely. In a similar way, image is developing now
to take up a large part of public communication via television, film,
photography, advertising, publication and other communication
design, architecture, fashion and so on.
The contemporary public environment is saturated by imagery
performing a discursive role. The urban space, for example, is a site
of corporate advertising, public information and wayfinding systems
that all use images to communicate. Various other forms of imagery
exist alongside of officially sanctioned communication, such as street
posters, graffiti, and so on. This range is replicated online and on
mobile technologies.

56 CO-CREATIVE PUBLICS AND PUBLICATION DESIGN PRACTICE

VIRTUAL PUBLIC SPACES

In a sense the emergent online public space is similar to the nascent

public sphere that resulted from the industrial revolution. It is an
outcome of a technological revolution; requires its population to talk
publicly; and is a disruptive force on conventional cultural modes. Writers
such as new media and democracy theorist Lincoln Dahlberg (Dahlberg
2001) and media and communications researcher, Sonia Livingstone
(Livingstone 2005) uses the Habermasian concept of the public sphere to
make this new space comprehensible as well as analyse it.
The concept of the public sphere is often used as a means to assess
the claim that the internet enhances democracy through a superior
information exchange and participation. In this study, however, I am
interested in how ‘publicity’ is being extended and how the experience
of communicating in public assists us to understand the audience in
the contemporary context. In other words, in this new or expanded
public sphere, especially since the introduction of social media, people
are learning how to communicate in the public and engage more
directly in less mediated forms.
In the public sphere that Habermas describes, writing private
correspondence, which was then transformed into the material
of publications, provided a training ground for those involved to
understand publicity.
Equally the conditions that surrounded the public sphere excluded
many from this experience. These conditions appear to be similar
in the virtual space. On the one hand, large numbers of people are
experiencing what it means to make a public statement and reveal
private interests and information through comment boards or social
media websites.
This is especially the case in social media where the lines between
private and public dissolve. On the other hand, the current population
of this virtual public space involves those who are literate in the

CO-CREATIVE PUBLICS AND PUBLICATION DESIGN PRACTICE 57

 technologies and practices of online media, and who have the
resources to devote to it. It excludes people who are not literate or who
are unable to access the requisite technology.
Given the pace of change in the technology and the uptake of internet-
based relations, we can imagine this public sphere will transform
relatively quickly, yet how it transforms will be different from the past.
The new public sphere may, in fact, re-introduce some of the social
conditions of Habermas’ original depiction of the critical discourse that
took place in the salon, journals and public life of the time.
The contemporary public sphere, including the public sphere
online, is made more complex by a number of factors. It is known
and measured in a way that the original was not. The public sphere
has been the object of study in sociology and marketing, which, for
example, can describe how it works and thus how it can be influenced.
Public opinion (the thoughts of the public expressed in the public
domain) has been commodified into market research, opinion polls
and focus group reports. Social theorist Michael Warner notes that
this type of activity also: ‘systematically distorts the public sphere,
producing something that passes as public opinion when in fact it has
nothing of the open-endedness, reflexive framing, or accessibility of
public discourse’ (2002: 54). Public opinion, in other words, is coerced
and directed by the systems that measure it and loses its relationship to
genuine public debate.
The public sphere by itself is insufficient as a means to understand the
audience that this study investigates. In the next section I look at how
this amorphous space can be broken into smaller component parts.

PUBLICS

The term Publics, or a public is used to distinguish a social grouping,

within the public sphere. Publics are self-organising entities. One can
exercise taste and inclination to deliberately and voluntarily become a

58 CO-CREATIVE PUBLICS AND PUBLICATION DESIGN PRACTICE

part of a public. There is no explicit structure built around this public.
The connection to other members is exercised through discourse
around an artefact or issue and this instance may or may not connect to
other instances of discourse.
According to cultural studies researcher Michael Warner (2005),
one becomes a member of a public by being addressed by and in turn
paying attention to something. There is no obligation to become a
member of a community; meet the other members; nor share any other
beliefs or interests.
Warner (2005: 55) stipulates that a ‘relation among strangers’ was
a requisite condition for modernity to develop. In his words: ‘The
modern social imaginary does not make sense without strangers’
(Warner 2002: 57). The concept of relations among strangers enables
the modern marketplace to form. It relieves the modern public of
having to associate together in tribes or kinship groups and replaces
these social forms with the marketplace, which does not require
consumers to know or be associated with each other.
Warner further contends, ‘a public is the social space created by the
reflexive circulation of discourse’ (2002: 62). This echoes the notion of
the dialogic that I refer to in the design conversation, where a dialogue
goes forward and backwards between instances of the design process.
Warner notes: ‘It is not the texts themselves that create publics, but
the concatenation of texts through time’ (2002: 62). It is through the
linking of texts and discourse through time that allows a public to
take shape. A public can therefore exist within this discourse and be
identified by its relationship to the polemic or conversation.
The mechanics of how this discourse works across time, different
locations and distinct social groupings can be known as circulation.
This returns me to the idea of communication flow, which now extends
itself outside of the linear flow between two points (people). Now the
flow spans across time, and incorporates others, or more specifically

CO-CREATIVE PUBLICS AND PUBLICATION DESIGN PRACTICE 59

 acknowledges that others are being addressed as well as oneself. Here
Warner also includes others who are ‘onlookers’ seemingly not directly
involved on the conversation.

CIRCULATION

Warner (2002) stipulates the connection between periodical print

publication and circulation is in the timing of a publication. Timing was
part of the mechanical nature of circulation: a newsletter, published
on a specific date, would mark a point in the public discourse. This is
challenged by the asymmetrical temporality of internet publication,
where the event of publication is not tied to a specific scheduled time.
It is interesting, for example, to note the two positions in regard
to timing, exemplified by the release of secret diplomatic documents
on WikiLeaks (January 2011). By publishing the information in
conventional media such as the newspapers regularized the irregular
release of documents on the web. Discussion of the reports followed
the newspaper release date, rather than the source (web) release date.
Similarly, this disparity between the mechanics of conventional and
new media is evidenced at ABC radio where production clusters are
organized around publication times. Therefore, programs that go to
air each day are produced by the Dailies cluster, those airing each week
by the Weeklies, and all others by the Arts (considered non-temporal
within the scheme of things).

NETWORKED PUBLICS AND COMMUNITIES

In this study I do not address the literature and ideas about community,
which has been prevalent in much of the writing about the virtual
space. See for example Felicia Song’s book Virtual Communities: Bowling
Alone, Online Together (Song 2010), in which she critiques the community
as a metaphor for online interaction; or Danah Boyd, writing in A
networked self: identity, community and culture on social network sites (Boyd

60 CO-CREATIVE PUBLICS AND PUBLICATION DESIGN PRACTICE

2010). Instead I am interested in how the concept of networks provides
a different way to understand social relationships online.
Dimitra Milioni proposes the notion of ‘networked publics’ as
an alternative to community as a descriptor of the type of social
relationships that form online. In Milioni’s view ‘multiple publics exist
and one can belong to many different publics simultaneously’ (2002:
53). Milioni conflates ‘two important shifts in socialization and public
communication: the shift from communities to networks and the shift
from media to publics’ (Milioni 2009: 276; author’s italics).
In the first shift, the often romanticized notion of community gives
way to network sociality, which she describes as ‘informational’ social
relations, formed by temporary but intense encounters based on
individualization and technogenic closeness’ (2002: 276). That is, that
people are connected by their personal relationship to information,
often via electronic media situations. In a sense, this is similar to Nardi
and O’Day’s notion of locality (Nardi and O’Day 1999: 55), which
extracts and detaches the qualities of co-presence and co-location and
proposes them as experiences outside of those physical conditions.
The network is an alternative metaphor used to describe the
connection that takes place online, and which incidentally relates
to the networked structure of the internet itself. It is also useful in
conceptualizing relationships that exist across both the internet and
physical worlds. It is on this basis that Milioni is able to move away
from the earlier idea of community towards networks, which she
defines as social systems that expand according to the level of activity
within the system (Milioni 2009: 276).
In the second shift Milioni identifies a move from media to publics.
Media here refers to traditional media structures, which are imposed to
mediate information and control its flow. Publics, on the other hand,
are envisaged as active, communication-producing entities. These
publics are diverse and participatory, involved in the production of

CO-CREATIVE PUBLICS AND PUBLICATION DESIGN PRACTICE 61

 media as well as consuming it and they exist within ‘networked flows
of communication’ (2009: 276).

CO-CREATIVE PUBLIC AND NETWORKS

The characteristics of a public that Warner (2002: 50) enumerates

(he lists seven in all) help to compose an alternative picture of the
contemporary audience, orientated towards public participation.
Instead of passive consumers at the one end of the spectrum or
committed community members at the other, this social clustering,
which I term co-creative publics, is active but non-aligned.
Co-creator is a term used in social media to identify a relationship
between people whose intention it is to jointly create a media outcome.
Co-creation occurs in several different ways. It is evident in open
source software development where a beta (prototype) version of the
software is uploaded to the internet by the developer/s to make the
full software code accessible to other developers. This is done without
charge. Participants are invited to modify the software and repost
it online with the condition that he or she does not charge for the
improvements. As the process develops the software is improved by the
co-creators and finally released for use by the public. The open source
movement has had an effect on the ethos of internet development.
In Viral Spiral, David Bollier (2008) outlines the history and ideology
of the open source movement and the critical place of the co-creator and
socially created value. A co-creator is one who contributes to the value
of the technology or service produced. It is not necessarily a situation of
equal contribution, nor is it essential that the co-creator is involved in
generating the initial idea. He or she simply joins in and participates in
a way that is appropriate and viable. This marks a different social and
creative relationship from the one a conventional collaborator might
engage in. A collaborator is likely to be more closely committed to the
project or venture: working as a partner, conceiving the idea and/or

62 CO-CREATIVE PUBLICS AND PUBLICATION DESIGN PRACTICE

developing the project and bringing it to a resolution. While there are
numerous types of collaboration, the general sense of collaboration
tends to be that it is relatively equal and negotiated.
A co-creator on the other hand is less predictable in his or her
participation. It is possible for the co-creator to join a project under
different terms and conditions. He or she, might for example,
contribute only what is in their own interest, or participate only in part,
not all, of the venture. It is this potential distance from the venture that
distinguishes the co-creator from the conventional collaborator.
The distance between the two types of participatory commitments is
similar to the type of independence that distinguishes a public from a
community. A public, according to Warner (2002), self-organises and
is comprised of strangers. A co-creator could be seen to share these
characteristics. That is, he or she organises their own relationship
to the venture; in addition, it is not necessary to know the other
participants to be a part of the venture.
Take, for example, a co-created social media site such as Vimeo. A
co-creator is not involved in the initial design or intention of the site.
Yet he or she can contribute feedback on how the site works and the
offer suggestions for improvement. As this type of site is intentionally
iterative and seeks ongoing feedback, a participant in this is a part of
co-creating the ongoing site. In social media this type of co-creation
operates on the principal that the social media website is itself an
ongoing creative artefact, constantly being modified and improved by
its users and proprietors.
In addition to the potential to contribute to the working of the site, the
co-creator can also contribute to the body of work that the site contains.
He or she is not obliged to contribute anything other than what they
are personally motivated to do. They could post an image, for example,
or a comment on another participant’s contribution. It is possible that
through this level of involvement the co-creator engages with another

CO-CREATIVE PUBLICS AND PUBLICATION DESIGN PRACTICE 63

 creator, in order to collaborate with them on their own project. However,
this level of activity is not essential to being a co-creator.
The independence between the co-creator and the publishing venture
marks one distinguishing feature of co-creation. Another is that the
relationship between one co-creator and another is not necessarily
equivalent. By this I mean one co-creator could contribute 80 percent of
the input to a project and another 20 percent, or one co-creator could be
an amateur and another an expert, yet it is still a co-creation.
Interestingly, as the attributes of a co-creator move across from the
raw amateur space to the refined professional space it is likely that
they will alter and evolve in the transition. Nevertheless, something
of the loose, emergent nature is retained and circulated through the
practice to keep the relationship between designer and public fresh
and responsive.
Thus the ambition in this study has been to conceptualise the
designer differently as someone who can adapt to emergent practices
in the professional situation; and in turn, be open and attentive to
challenges and changes within the design situation.

THE DESIGNER AND A CO-CREATIVE PUBLIC

In this study I propose that mediation is a valid activity and one

that is essential to the way a networked public works, and how
communication flows across the network. Mediation is a means of
sense-making, As researcher, Angelina Russo, explains in terms of
storytelling:

What you’re trying to do is move people away from the story itself
and move them towards how to communicate that story. What is it
about that story that is important and meaningful to other people?
What’s the problem we’re approaching here, how does the story
illustrate what you’re trying to communicate? (Russo 2010).

64 CO-CREATIVE PUBLICS AND PUBLICATION DESIGN PRACTICE

 Being able to take a story from the person who is invested in it and
then re-purpose it into something that can be communicated hints at
the type of function the publication designer can do.
I explore the potential for how a designer might refashion their role
in a co-creative situation in the chapter on Pool. An innovation by the
Pool team that emerged in Pool research is the role of Social Media
Producer. This is someone who can be a professional who works in the
social media space to collaboratively develop a participant’s response
to a call out; and in my experience of being part of a design team who
created a design for the co-creative space.
At the Conclusion of this study I draw together two instances of the
notion of the designer as a co-creator, that emerge in two of the case
studies. These are the practice of self-management, identified in the
case study into Backyard Press and Champion Books; and the social
media producer as an example of professional co-creative practice
(from Pool). I define the co-creative situation with reference to Michael
Warner’s depiction of a public, combined with the contemporary
usage of the term co-creator that was associated with the Open Source
movement in computer programming. I then develop two scenarios for
how the role of the designer as a co-creator could be envisaged.

CO-CREATIVE PUBLICS AND PUBLICATION DESIGN PRACTICE 65

 CASE STUDY #1

DESIGN AUDIO CLOUD

EXHIBITION SPACE AT NEW

VIEWS#2 MELBOURNE MUSEUM
2008. AUDIO SPEAKERS
INSTALLED IN THE CEILING

66 CO-CREATIVE PUBLICS AND PUBLICATION DESIGN PRACTICE

At the outset of this doctoral study I had a broad sense of my
area of inquiry. I had selected the field of publication design
as a vehicle to explore the broader practices of design, with a
particular focus on the communicative nature of the practice.

In a manner similar to the practice of resource collecting and sketching

in the initial stages of a design project, I designed a research project
that would allow me to consider what a publication is. There were
two important aspects of this: the form and the content. In relation to
the form I was interested in challenging my conventional practice of
designing physical artefacts such as a book or paper publication.
Such a publication had to communicate something, as such I
decided to use this project to explore how the act of communication
works in design as the content, using the different conversations that
occur in the practice.
These two foci of the project allowed me to explore the practice
of design, through practice, and to challenge assumptions about
publication design. This became the Design Audio Cloud, the first Case
Study of this doctoral investigation.
The Design Audio Cloud was a publication that used sound as its
medium. Designing a sound publication forced me to move out of my

This project was carried out under an RMIT Human Research Ethics Committee
application (CHEAN B): The Design Conversation: design as conversation; conversation
through design
CO-CREATIVE PUBLICS AND PUBLICATION DESIGN PRACTICE 67
 usual practice of print and web based publication design. The different
medium made me aware of practices that had become routine and
therefore somewhat elusive. This enabled me to think through the
characteristics of a publication from a material point of view.
In order to investigate the conversational nature of design practice,
I decided to undertake a series of conversations with peers, from the
field of communication design. I recorded designers talking about
topics they selected that were current in their own thinking at the
time. My aim was to use these conversations with peers as a means
to reflect on and critically position my own observations within the
broader context of my sphere of practice. The conversations became
the material that I used in the design of the publication, expressed
in the form of audio tracks, these functioned in the way that I would
otherwise use text/typography in a print publication.
The Design Audio Cloud was included in an international exhibition and
this very public manifestation, alerted me to what later became central to
the study, namely the public dimension in publication design.
I first outline the Design Audio Cloud project in detail. I then discuss
the discoveries I made in this project and how these led to insights that
drove the doctoral research, thereby prompting further lines of inquiry.
These discoveries are the threads that connect the three case studies
and lead to the Conclusion.

AUDIO CLOUD PROJECT DESCRIPTION

The Design Audio Cloud became a compilation of short audio interviews

with practicing designers and design educators. It was the initial research
project for this study and was made as a contribution to the New Views
2 exhibition of posters. The posters were curated into a visual exhibition
for the New Views 2: Conversations and Dialogues in Graphic Design
Conference, at the London College of Communication, July 2008 (http://
[Link]/gallery/posters). The posters were design responses to

68 CO-CREATIVE PUBLICS AND PUBLICATION DESIGN PRACTICE

a question about the future of graphic design, the aim being to use an
iconic graphic medium to speak about the future of graphic design. It
was proposed that the Design Audio Cloud would extend the curatorial aim
of provoking a discourse about the field, through the field, by simulating
design artefacts talking to each other. In November 2008 the exhibition
and soundscape were later installed in the Melbourne Museum.
In order to recruit interviewees I sent the following invitation to
participate in the Design Audio Cloud project to potential participants
(see front of invitation, above).

Dear …. ,
I want to capture some thoughts on design and present them in an
audio cloud installation at the New Views 2 Conference this year. So
I’m writing to you to entice you to let go of some of yours.
The theme of the conference is Conversations and Dialogues in
Graphic Design. The question that I would like you to respond to is:
Design Is…?

CO-CREATIVE PUBLICS AND PUBLICATION DESIGN PRACTICE 69

 POSTER EXHIBITION AT
NEW VIEWS#2
MELBOURNE MUSEUM 2008.

You have been chosen because you have been identified as someone
who represents a particular aspect of contemporary design and has a
reputation for thoughtful reflections on the practice.

To construct the soundscape I conducted interviews with fourteen

designers and design educators. Initially I used a strategy of providing
participants with a set of randomly arranged words to trigger their
responses. The words included: outputs / pattern / voice / precise play /
flaneur / ratio / hetroglossia / porous / variable / act / mask / dialogue / edge
/ vessel / object. However, I found that this strategy became a distraction
and focused the contributors on the structure of the investigation, rather
than their own thoughts about what matters to them in contemporary
design practice. Once I realized this, I simply asked contributors to
respond without preparation to the question: Design is?

70 CO-CREATIVE PUBLICS AND PUBLICATION DESIGN PRACTICE

 With this change, it appeared that the designers were able to talk
more freely about issues or aspects of design that were something that
he or she was thinking of at the time. This produced responses that
were more conversational in tone and of particular interest to them.
This tone was appropriate to the concept behind the installation,
namely to simulate the experience of overhearing designers talk, as if
the exhibition visitor was ‘listening-in’ to studio discussions.
The two installations (in London and Melbourne) were different as
the spaces and the playback facilities varied. I installed the Melbourne
installation along with the Melbourne Museum’s curatorial staff. In
this case selected responses were edited and compiled into three audio
tracks. These were played concurrently over three speakers, which were
located on the ceiling of the gallery space. Visitors were able to position
themselves under one speaker to hear the track independently of the

CO-CREATIVE PUBLICS AND PUBLICATION DESIGN PRACTICE 71

 others. Alternatively he or she could move to a place where the tracks
overlaped, to hear it as if multiple conversations were taking place.
The voices in the ‘cloud’ represented a mixture of people who practiced
and/or taught design. Some participants were interested in the details of
practice. Others discussed design education and some of the issues they
confront in the way design is taught and what it means to be a teacher of
design. One designer discussed the place of structure in his information
design business and how it works with the wilder aspects of creativity. Yet
another talked about the essential nature of communication in forming a
community, and from there, producing beauty.
The diversity of the remarks from disparate viewpoints gave a sense
that design thinking extends past the practical and instrumental act of
making a design artefact. The ideas ranged from the interchange found
in education, through to concepts of sustainability and community.
It was this diversity that prompted me to think about the concept of
dissonance, which I later explored when working on what constituted
the design conversation (see P. 34)
The conversations in this project also established a sense of
connectivity between the respondents who shared the experience of
being design practitioners and educators, but who each approached
his or her practice differently. These ideas prompted me to explore the
place of design in the world; the disparate voices in design; as well as
the connections that exist within design practice.
The aural overlay of voices added the additional aspect of random
thoughts being passed between numbers of interlocutors. I was
interested to see if I could suggest links between one instance and
another, where the influence goes both ways. That is, by hearing the
intersections of disparate ideas, the listener would hear the ideas
influencing each other. This was to suggest that design ideas are
expressed discretely as design artefacts (i.e. the posters on the walls),
which relate to each other when they come into the world. These

72 CO-CREATIVE PUBLICS AND PUBLICATION DESIGN PRACTICE

connections suggested a conversational relationship between the
works. I followed this line of thought and the sense of interlocking
conversations, which led me to Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of the dialogic.
The context of the recordings and the exhibition of posters was also
important. The fact that the recordings were being played in a public
space meant that the thoughts and comments of the designers were being
taken out of the closed domain of professionals and opened up to public
scrutiny. As they come into the world these thoughts form an artefact
that is situated in the public. The compilation is perceived and received
differently from when the recordings are separate, disconnected pieces.

THE SOUND-PIECE AS A DESIGN ARTEFACT

The Design Audio Cloud was a soundpiece designed as a publication

of numerous voices, with an implied link to the images on the
gallery walls. In a sense it was a three dimensional publication
that incorporated the space, the walls, images and sound into one
publication format. The grid, one of the prime design devices in the
design of publications also became three dimensional, following
the cubed shape of the gallery space and accounting for the angles at
which the sound was directed towards the listener. In addition, the
differences in tone of voice in each participant’s response and level of
thought gave weight to the various ideas and statements.

SUMMARY OF THE PROJECT

The Design Audio Cloud was the first step I made into the overarching
inquiry of the PhD. It was intended to be a sketch of the central
argument and to highlight, if faintly at the time, the key points in
constructing the argument.
Through this project, I constructed the methodology for the doctoral
study of researching through practice, context and materiality. The
method prompted a number of higher order ideas to consider. These

CO-CREATIVE PUBLICS AND PUBLICATION DESIGN PRACTICE 73

 included the concept of the design conversation as a means to explore
the communicative nature in publication design; the relationship
between the designer and audience; the inherent public-ness in
publication design; and the value of experimentation in publication
design. I take up these threads in the following case studies.

DISCOVERIES

This project resulted in two key discoveries that became pertinent to

the entire doctoral investigation: the notion of a publication as an act,
which is performed; and that it is an act of making public thoughts,
ideas, opinions and stories, and is performed through conversation.
The interviewees in this Audio Cloud were a random set of people I
recruited from my own contacts and associated networks. Participants
were asked through the interview process to reflect on issues they thought
were important to contemporary design practice. Each of the participants
conveyed a clear sense that they were constantly thinking about how they
worked and the impact they made as designers and design educators.
The term ‘design conversation’ coalesced as the focal point
in the research at this time. I was using the term to capture the
communicative situation within design.
At this point, I began to consider that the design conversation could
have a broader application. While this thought did not come directly
from the interviews with practitioners, it occurred to me that the design
conversation might be a way to open the design process to non-designers.
As I reflected on the materiality of the publication and the
conversations I was having with peers, I became increasingly aware of
the possibility of publication design as a manifestation of a conversation,
which could be deconstructed and its component parts identified. If this
was possible then, as Nathan Shedoff (2001) tells us in Experience Design,
once we can identify and isolate the components of a situation we can

74 CO-CREATIVE PUBLICS AND PUBLICATION DESIGN PRACTICE

then design with them. If this was the case, and a publication design is a
form of design conversation then there was the potential to re-design the
design conversation to include the audience in the design process.

PUBLICATIONS AS AN ACT

As I reflected on the Design Audio Cloud, I began to think that the

conversations held in design practice had an agency beyond the design
artefact. That is, that while conversations are embedded in the artefact
as the artefact is being made, a larger, extended conversation can be
said to occur beyond the point where the artefact enters the world and
into the public.
As discussed in Chapter Two, the concept that language enacts design
and that this process is performative, which Andy Dong (2009: 16)
claims, helped to orient my thinking. The connection between language,
design and public confirmed for me that the design conversation would
provide a rich place to explore as a preliminary site of inquiry.
The Design Audio Cloud raised a number of early stage, sub-
questions for me which would become essential to the latter stages
of the study. These included things such as: what is the nature of the
design conversation as it currently exists in design practice? Does an
energetic discourse through a design project necessarily lead to an
energetic design outcome? Or is the outcome influenced by the client’s
expectations or the designer’s intention?
The first of these questions led me to consider how design
practice incorporates conversations as a means for the making of an
artefact. These conversations are structured deliberately to move the
process through its stages and to ensure that some level of mutual
understanding is reached at key points. I expanded on this concept in
Chapter 2: Two views on the research.

CO-CREATIVE PUBLICS AND PUBLICATION DESIGN PRACTICE 75

 PERFORMING THE ACT OF PUBLICATION IN PUBLIC

The questions about the relationship between the design conversation

and its outcome opened up another path of investigation in the study.
Recently movements such as participatory design and co-design have
been developed to include the client,commissioning organisation, or
user group as an active partner in the design process. This would involve
them being more than a commissioning agent for a design (client,
author or publisher) to being a co-designer in the design process.
This realisation prompted me to consider that if it is possible to
include the client in the design conversation, is it then also possible
to turn this conversation towards the audience and include them
in a similar way? This thought framed the initial ideas around my
second research question: How can a public become conversant with
the language of design (the design conversation)? Although such a
perspective is becoming increasingly common in many areas of design
practice, it is relatively new in publication design where the audience is
firmly framed as the consumer of the design outcome.

SETTING A DIRECTION FOR THE STUDY

This identification of design as a performance of a conversation

with a public, set the direction for the next phases of the study. In
the following case studies my understanding regarding the nature of
design artefacts, conversation and communication, the public sphere,
publics, networks and form of collaboration that emerged in the
project, continued to evolve.
I reflected on my own practice, specifically my experience in print
and publishing collectives Backyard Press and Champion Books. This
extended my deliberation on the material nature of publications (print,
web and other). From the experience in the collectives I started to tease
out several threads of thought to do with types of collaboration as well
as types of audiences. I discuss these in the following case study.

76 CO-CREATIVE PUBLICS AND PUBLICATION DESIGN PRACTICE

 At the same time I undertook an investigation into research into
communication and conversation through the work of Mikhail
Bakhtin, Andy Dong and Ranulph Glanville among others. I used this
foundation to form a description of the design conversation and the
potential of this conversation to extend to the audience.
The confluence of making the Design Audio Cloud and the lines of
inquiry it provoked, also led me to consider the way that artefacts are
used in the design process to construct a listening structure.
Artefacts such as sketches, mood boards, design roughs and the
schedule of proofing points, which Henrik Gedenryd calls inquiry
materials, show how a designer uses these artefacts to ask questions of
the client or commissioner. Then the a designer listens and processes
the answers, often through other artefacts, such as diagrams, ‘walls’
and data visualisations.
Later, particularly during the research project into the Pool social
media site, I addressed the nature of the audience, using the lens of the
public sphere, publics and networks.

CO-CREATIVE PUBLICS AND PUBLICATION DESIGN PRACTICE 77

 CASE STUDY #2
PARTICIPATORY PUBLISHING

BACKYARD PRESS
CHAMPION BOOKS

BACKYARD PRESS AND CHAMPION

BOOKS WERE HOUSED IN TWO
ADJACENT DOMESTIC BUILDINGS
SHOWN HERE

78 CO-CREATIVE PUBLICS AND PUBLICATION DESIGN PRACTICE

In the late 1970s I co-established Backyard Press, a semi-
commercial print collective and Champion Books, an
associated experimental publishing venture. These two
entities were located together and shared many of the
same workers, yet each entity had its own character and
orientation.

I use my experience of working at Backyard Press and Champion

Books as the second Case Study for this doctorate as they provide
two instances of participatory publishing in a conventional sense.
Participation, in these contexts includes the activities of the people
who worked in the two collectives, as well as the various audiences that
formed around them.
As the doctoral study evolved, I came to realize the importance
of comparing conventional collaborative or collective methods of
engagement with contemporary social and participatory media. This
case study with its reflection on these two print collectives, provided
me with a way to discuss current electronic forms of collaboration
in the context of its antecedent analog approaches to production. In
particular, I concentrate on the self-managed producer (in Backyard
Press) as an analogy for the co-creator who represents collaboration
in contemporary social and participatory media. I look too, at the

CO-CREATIVE PUBLICS AND PUBLICATION DESIGN PRACTICE 79

 audiences around Backyard Press and Champion Books as examples of
co-creative publics, which engaged closely with the work we made. The
design conversation is also evident throughout the interactions at both
Backyard Press and Champion Books. Here the conversation exists in
the form used by workers within the operations, as well as in a number
of interactions with the publics around them.
I begin this section with background on the two collectives,
Backyard Press and Champion Books. I distinguish between them
based on their differing core activities, organizational structures
and their influence on the culture of the time. This is followed by
highlighting the discoveries and research leads, which are pertinent to
the overarching doctoral study that emerged in the reflection.
This description of the collectives, in terms of their structure and
characteristics defines the context of this case study. From that I am
able to compare the types of collaboration in these experiences with
the sort of participation that has evolved in contemporary social and
participatory media context.

80 CO-CREATIVE PUBLICS AND PUBLICATION DESIGN PRACTICE

AUTHOR [LEFT] WITH COLLEAGUE
DAVID RAE AT THE RECENTLY
ASCQUIRED 20” X 30”
HEIDLEBERG KORD PRESS C.1980

CO-CREATIVE PUBLICS AND PUBLICATION DESIGN PRACTICE 81

 BACKYARD PRESS WORKERS
L TO R: CHRIS WHITE, AUTHOR,
MARK CARTER, PAUL GREENE IN
THE KITCHEN/PRE-PRESS ROOM

82 CO-CREATIVE PUBLICS AND PUBLICATION DESIGN PRACTICE

BACKGROUND TO THE COLLECTIVES

BACKYARD PRESS

Ted Hopkins is a poet and author who, at the time of founding

Champion Books, was intent on producing books that would not
otherwise be published. In 1976 he and his partner Sharon Hill
set up Backyard Press and Champion Books. Backyard Press was a
commercial venture and Champion Books was an experimental book
publisher. Ted inherited an offset print machinery plant from his
father. Circumstances led him and Sharon to bring the machinery
from Moe, in regional Victoria, to re-establish the press in Prahran,
Melbourne. When I became involved shortly after we consolidated and
established collective frameworks for joint venture.
In 1977, I started working at Backyard Press and Champion Books.
As well as my interest in book publishing, I was keen to explore
collective practices with other creative practitioners. As the venture
grew I directed the development of Backyard Press as a worker-
controlled collective.
Backyard Press became a part of the music scene at a time when the
local performers, promoters and venue managers in Melbourne were
starting out. These people would come in to the Press to commission
the publicity work themselves. They tended to be as inexperienced
at business as we were, but the micro-economy of live music was
sufficiently buoyant to keep the money flowing. Work and social life
bled into each other, with invitations to the venues and gigs, and
wads of cash a regular part of the payment system. As the bands and
particularly the promoters and music labels—like Mushroom Records,

CO-CREATIVE PUBLICS AND PUBLICATION DESIGN PRACTICE 83

 Frontier Touring Co, Premier Music, Suicide Records and others—
grew and morphed into the mainstream, so did Backyard Press.
There was a loyal following that pushed us to keep pace with their
demands: greater quantities of print material, larger sizes of street
posters, more expensive colour printing, new technologies that
allowed quicker turnaround and so on. Initially, we would print one
thousand copies of a pamphlet, which later became fifty thousand
when the promoters established themselves.
The early 1980s was the beginning of the transition from a music
scene, characterised by a ‘garage’ economy to a music industry, which
was coordinating the activities of musicians, promoters, publicity
and events. Its evolving program of major local and international acts
expanded the audience and produced an industrial base.
For us this meant the publicity increased in scale as well as quantity.
Promotional posters went from A3 up to 60” x 40”, and then to 4 and
6 sheet posters (4 large sheets making up one billboard sized poster).
Over time we improved our facilities to include an A2 Bromide Camera
and platemaking facilities, Heidelberg KORD 20” x 30” offset press,
a 60” x 40” semi-automatic screenprint table, upgraded small offset
printers and a Roland 60” x 40” offset press. The latter was acquired in
a merger with VersaPrint who had previously been supplying us with
high run, large format, colour posters.
People in inner urban Melbourne at the time, would have passed
our printed work on the streets and music fans would have been able
to pick up our pamphlets at music venues. The posters we printed
dominated railway underpasses and building walls. It was a heady
time, and I found it exciting to be part of something that impacted on
the Melbourne’s cultural life and public space.
The printed work helped to define the visual style of the period.
This was at a time before mainstream advertising recognised the street
as a space to colonise. At the time, the communication channels for

84 CO-CREATIVE PUBLICS AND PUBLICATION DESIGN PRACTICE

RAINER LINZ [BOTTOM] CHECKS
POSTERS COMING OFF FROM THE
60” X 40” ROLAND PRESS

CO-CREATIVE PUBLICS AND PUBLICATION DESIGN PRACTICE 85

 these events and venue programs were printed material, ads in street
magazines, word-of-mouth and community radio.
Initially the artwork that was printed at Backyard Press was
immediate, hand done and reproduced using the lowest cost
technologies available. It was bought in as camera-ready (set up to have
film and plates made from it); often it was done by a member of the
band or a friend with some design or illustration skills.
Over time, the quality and finish of the design improved as
the budgets that bands were able to spend increased. The music
‘community’ transformed into the music ‘industry’, a change that
brought with it new opportunities for designers and publishers
like ourselves. It also connected us to changes that were happening
overseas, particularly in England and America.
The Australian music industry started to link into the international
music scene. In England, designers such as Neville Brody and Peter
Saville were closely connected with the UK music scene and influenced
the style of the times. Graphic design in this field moved from the
raw ready-made look, popular when Brody started out designing
publications like The Face, towards more sophisticated work
represented by publications such as Arena magazine.
Locally, promoters began to employ designers, replacing the
informal arrangement where a band member would do the design,
or ask a friend to design material for them. A new and creative area
of work was opening up for local designers. Close attention was paid
to the work coming out of the overseas design scene and it was often
emulated in Australia.

CONTRIBUTION TO THE ALTERNATIVE MEDIA CULTURE

The large format screen-printing facilities that Backyard Press built up

for the music posters also became a desirable way of making political
art. This resonated with the vibrant poster art being produced by

86 CO-CREATIVE PUBLICS AND PUBLICATION DESIGN PRACTICE

ONE OF A SERIES OR ‘RASCALS’
CARDS PRINTED FOR THE 1980
FEDERAL ELECTION

CO-CREATIVE PUBLICS AND PUBLICATION DESIGN PRACTICE 87

 number of other collectives around the country such as Another Planet
Posters, Bloody Good Graphics, Jill Posters in Melbourne, the Tin Sheds in
Sydney, and Redback Graphix in Wollongong
Ian Robertson joined Backyard Press in the early 1980s. He came
from a background in performance art but his interest shifted to
making highly crafted posters. At Backyard Press he produced a series
of posters, often up to 12 colours, on the theme of accordions, Mao
and feminist politics. Titles like: A political accordion snap, Accordion to
Mao and Xmas Dinner 1981, give some idea of the ‘dadaist’ approach
to political themes. Making these posters was only possible with
around the clock access to the print facilities. Each poster set could
take several months to complete: 12 colours meant 12 separate prints
through the press, in multiple copies.
Along with Ian, several poster makers used the facilities to create
a type of political art output that opened Backyard Press up to a new
community. Through my own contacts, we produced a number of
works for the Australian Surrealists Group, located in Adelaide.
Another group of friends within and around Backyard Press set up the
RASCALS, the ‘Rational and Sane Citizens Against Liberal Stupidity’.
This was at the time when Malcolm Fraser seized power from the
then Prime Minister Gough Whitlam. Whitlam was ousted at the 1975
Federal election, following what is now known as ‘The Dismissal’.
Fraser’s Liberal Opposition blocked supply in the Federal Senate and
the Governor-General at the time, Sir John Kerr, de-commissioned
the Whitlam Labor Government forcing an election. The elected
Fraser Government was divisive and led to strong and lasting popular
opposition. The RASCALS group produced a number of anti-Liberal
Party postcards and other items for the 1980 election. Humour was the
key to anything that came out of RASCALS. Slogans such as: I’ve Had a
Fraser of a Day, He Lies and He Knows He Lies, Beau’s Not Voting Liberal (Beau

88 CO-CREATIVE PUBLICS AND PUBLICATION DESIGN PRACTICE

was the Backyard dog), all of which worked on the idea of making
political communication that didn’t rely on appealing to the serious-
minded voter.
Robertson’s work and the material that was coming out of RASCALS
were both highly visual and disruptive. The Mao series played with
the visual metaphor of a political icon, satiring Mao’s celebrity while
at the same time finding pleasure in the political tension created by
what Mao had come to mean in the context of ‘fear of invasion’ and
cultural difference with a conservative Australian audience. RASCALS
experimented with the idea of disrupting familiar spaces, like the
Melbourne Cricket Ground. Malcolm Fraser was the Number One
ticket holder at Carlton Football Club. Around the time of the election
we produced a facsimile newspaper display poster with the splash:
Blues Drop Mal, and posted them around the MCG when Carlton
(the Blues) was playing. It was commented on in the media and many
believed it to be true. Media and cultural studies author, Pollyanna Ruiz
makes the following comment on a similar action set in a Macdonald’s
café in the UK, as this type of unsettling political activity:
In this way, protesters create an ‘ambivalent position between
strangeness and familiarity’ (quoting Cuppers 2005) which jolts
spectators out of their usual state of distraction and encourages them
to reevaluate the discourses which surround them (Ruiz 2009: 211).
We enjoyed the unusual place we occupied. We owned the type of print
facilities that were often out of the reach of other activists, yet we also
worked outside of the traditional Left structure. The pleasure of making
unlikely political work attracted others to participate. Some participants
became a part of the ongoing collective, while others moved in and out.

CO-CREATIVE PUBLICS AND PUBLICATION DESIGN PRACTICE 89

 YALLOURN STORIES BY TED
HOPKINS. THE REMOVAL OF THE
YALLOURN TOWNSHIP
CHAMPION BOOKS

90 CO-CREATIVE PUBLICS AND PUBLICATION DESIGN PRACTICE

CHAMPION BOOKS

Champion Books had a different agenda from Backyard Press. It set out
to experiment with book publishing, using and pushing the facilities
and expertise we were developing in Backyard Press. It involved some
of the people working in Backyard Press, but also drew in others who
shared an interest in small-scale publishing. We never thought of
Champion Books as a fine art publisher. To us, Champion only made
sense if it was challenging publishing conventions in one way or
another. In particular we sought to unsettle the production process, or
an idea of what literature looked like and how it could be read.
Ted Hopkins also thought ‘through’ the book form as he came to
conceive and realise both Teledex (Fig. 3), a simulated phone directory
(containing his poetry listed alphabetically); and The Book of Slab (Fig.
4) that takes its cue from the popular Time Life Science book series.
The Book of Slab is both a compilation of writing and a collection
of what was possible in printing at the time. The connection was a
deliberate strategy that brought the materials and processes of printing
into discourse with the writing to create an integrated text.
Material thinking leads to a type of insight that comes from the
interaction between people and materials. Henrik Gedenryd (1998 )
refers to this as interaction cognition. He points to the conversation
that we can have with the materials in making something like a book,
but also directs us to consider the interaction we have with the other
people involved in the process (Gedenryd 1998: 7). Nancy de Freitas,
discussing Paul Carter’s concept of material thinking says:
(Carter) describes the way in which the material world exists
between collaborators who contribute the discursive performances
which result in the materialisation of their thoughts and ultimately
the inventions of their joint work. It is an optimistic way of viewing
the creative method that collaborative artists and designers use in
constructing the world (de Freitas 2008: 6).

CO-CREATIVE PUBLICS AND PUBLICATION DESIGN PRACTICE 91

 This takes us back to the social dimension of a collective and how to
conceive of collective thought. The combination of ideas and opinions
naturally lead to something de Freitas identifies as ‘more generous
than each might have been on its own’ (2008:6), but it goes beyond this
as well. It could be described, as a ‘social imaginary’ (Habermas 1974:
104), where we construct something that represents those involved in
the process as well as the world we inhabit. It creates an identity and
provides a way to understand ourselves in the world.
We did, however, always think about how the final object would
address its public. The launch of the books was often a staged
event and an outcome in itself. These events worked as alternative
publicity—bringing into the public space—that operated outside of
the mainstream publishing and distribution networks. These book
launches were an acceptance that the works did not sit comfortably in a
conventional bookstore, nor were they comprehensible to mainstream
book reviewers. Today this alternative distribution occurs on the web
where publics meet directly online. That was not available to us at
that time, instead we brought the audience to the works, by staging
performances and events to mark the publication.

REFLECTING ON THE PRESSES

As I reflected on Backyard Press and Champion Books for this

doctoral study I could see that my experience at these two publishing
collectives would offer me an opportunity to draw on a deep knowledge
of working collectively, in practice.
The Design Audio Cloud project triggered thinking about the
form of a publication; the social context in which it is produced,
represented by conversations; and the performative and public nature of
publication design. Each of these had resonance with the conversations,
collaborative platforms, audiences and public events that were very much
a part of a living publishing collective, which I recount in this chapter.

92 CO-CREATIVE PUBLICS AND PUBLICATION DESIGN PRACTICE

TELEDEX BY TED HOPKINS
POETRY PRINTED ON TELEDEX
CARDS IN METAL CASE
CHAMPION BOOKS

DISCOVERIES

Two discoveries emerged out of the reflection on my experiences at

Backyard Press and Champion Books. The first was that the form of
self-managed workflow at Backyard Press could be used to understand
the contemporary, autonomous co-creator – a role in online
collaborations that is discussed further in the next chapter. The second
was to do with audience participation in the actions of the collectives
which can be one way to understand co-creative publics.

THE LINEAGE BETWEEN SELF-MANAGEMENT AND CONTEMPORARY CO-CREATION

In a conventional collective situation, roles are likely to be deliberately

undefined in favour of each member sharing responsibility for all

CO-CREATIVE PUBLICS AND PUBLICATION DESIGN PRACTICE 93

 aspects of the work to be performed. It is often a formative intention of

BUSINSEE AS USUAL BY PAUL

GREENE
CHAMPION BOOKS

94 CO-CREATIVE PUBLICS AND PUBLICATION DESIGN PRACTICE

CO-CREATIVE PUBLICS AND PUBLICATION DESIGN PRACTICE 95
 a collective to flatten any distinction between its members. By limiting
the concentration of power by individuals or small groups, a sense of
equity is generated and, participation is spread across the group.
In both Backyard Press and Champion Books we diverged from this
ideal in different ways and for different reasons. We created a fusion
of a self-managed production role, within a collective structure. This
fusion produced an innovation that is instructional when looking at
similar innovations in the current participatory context.
Backyard Press needed to produce commercial work effectively and
repeatedly. For this to happen, we needed to set in place a structure that
relied on individual responsibility for certain tasks. In a sense this followed
the standard rationale for a production-line approach used in most
industries. That is, by breaking the production chain into observable links it
is possible to identify the workflow and where it is blocked or underutilized.
Nonetheless, for us there was also a political imperative to counter the
standard production-line approach. To resolve this tension we instigated
a self-managed approach informed by the libertarian principle that an
individual is an independent and active agent within a group.
In this structure the individual had responsibility for the production
role they took on in Backyard Press and could develop it as they
saw necessary. In some instances this meant the individual had
purchasing power in their area; or the ability to negotiate workloads;
or opportunities to develop their expertise as required. Each member
would manage their own role in partnership with the others in the
collective. This set up a two-tiered structure: the broad collective,
which was in turn made up of self-managed work areas.
Over time Backyard Press grew to include more people working in
the day-to-day operations (up to 16 during one period). From the start
the intention was to operate as a worker-controlled collective. While
the print machinery used at the start had belonged to Ted Hopkins,
who founded the operations, most of equipment was replaced out

96 CO-CREATIVE PUBLICS AND PUBLICATION DESIGN PRACTICE

of the income generated from ongoing commercial work. This
established the common ownership of the plant.
The structure was fashioned to allow us to share in the income of
the press as well as fund our other interests, such as the publication of
books through Champion Books. The collective structure was a work-in-
progress throughout the life of the press. We were keen to understand it
as it evolved and had the opportunity when the press gained government
support to develop and to document its development.

DOCUMENTATION OF THE DEVELOPMENT

In the 1980s, the Victorian Labor State Government supported new

and existing co-operatives as a way to stimulate employment. The
government set up the Co-operative Development Program (CDP) to
fund a range of collective enterprises such as Backyard Press. The CDP
underpinned the co-operatives with finance, business support and
information about co-operative case studies. It demanded, however,
that the funded organisation were statutory co-operatives.
By this time Backyard Press was constituted a Propriety Limited
Company (Pty Ltd) to secure the resources of the group. Incidentally,
this was a more appropriate legal structure to reflect the group’s
worker controlled, collective intentions rather than a co-operative.
The Co-operative legal structure required an external (non-worker)
based directorship, which contradicted the notion of internal control.
We negotiated the structure and intention with the CDP and received
approximately $80,000.00 in funds.
This support gave Backyard Press the capital it had lacked, and
introduced industrial award based pay scales and compliance with
health and safety regulations (both welcomed by the group). The
changes resulted in some changes to the way the collective worked,
yet the core principles were maintained. Importantly it did not alter
the relationship between the dual objectives of the collective, namely

CO-CREATIVE PUBLICS AND PUBLICATION DESIGN PRACTICE 97

 THE BOOK OF SLAB BY TED
HOPKINS. DOUBLE PAGE SPREAD
CHAMPION BOOKS

98 CO-CREATIVE PUBLICS AND PUBLICATION DESIGN PRACTICE

CO-CREATIVE PUBLICS AND PUBLICATION DESIGN PRACTICE 99
 collective decision-making on essential issues; and autonomous
worker control in a self-managed production process.
In 1984 the CDP funded a case study research project around
Backyard Press. Independent researcher, Stan Anson and Backyard
Press member Chris White wrote a draft for this study: Ministry of
Employment and Training Co-operative Case Study: Backyard Press Pty.
Ltd. Draft One, 3-5 August 1984 (Anson and White 1984). In this study
Anson defined the motivations of the collective members in what he
describes as a ‘decision hierarchy’:

The motives are listed in order of indispensability: the first could

not be abandoned without destroying the central purpose of the
enterprise (nor, for practical purposes, could the second, but as we
have seen the first could not be abandoned in the interests of the
second); the last could be abandoned with the least threat to the
central purpose of the enterprise.

Sequence of Motives:
1. autonomous and democratic work organisation
2. viable source of livelihood
3. exercise of craft in the production of printed material
4. access to means of self-expression
5. broad congruence of extra-enterprise views and values [political
and social orientations] (Anson and White 1984: 9)

Anson goes on to mark these principles as the reason why:

the turnover of members has not threatened the viability of the

enterprise. It has meant, if you like, that BYP has functioned less like
an organism, in which one part endangers the life of the whole, and
more like a mechanism to which (within limits) part might be added
or subtracted or interchanged freely (1984: 9).

100 CO-CREATIVE PUBLICS AND PUBLICATION DESIGN PRACTICE

 The self-managed structure, in other words, provided a process that
eased people into the collective and coped operationally when people
left the collective. It represented a viable network, with independent
agents, supported by a collective infrastructure.
In retrospect this was an achievement that we were not completely
conscious of at the time. Anson notes the potential contradiction
between the two goals of ‘greater democracy and greater autonomy in
the workplace’ (1984: 2). Democracy privileges the majority view, while
autonomy is orientated towards the individual.
The solution consisted of several aspects worth noting. Democratic
decision-making in the collective was made by consensus rather
than organised voting. This type of decision-making was made at
regular meetings that were held to decide on issues that affected the
whole collective. This might include, for example, the purchase on
new equipment, the need for extra staff, or allocation of resources to
Champion Books and other external activities.
These meetings were largely amiable and consensual. However, if
there was something contentious to be decided on, the meetings could
be argumentative and often unresolved. Yet there was an underlying
sense of collegial good humour that militated against us taking our
organisation too seriously.
At the day-to-day production level, decisions were made based on
self-management principles. Full-time workers were responsible for
their own area in-conjunction with the others working directly with
them. That is, while each of us was involved in many aspects of the
production, we each managed a specific area. These areas included
sales, accounts, scheduling and resource management, pre-press
preparation, offset and screenprint production and finishing. This
approach created issues of co-ordination, but gave each worker control
of their own production process, and created the autonomy we sought.

CO-CREATIVE PUBLICS AND PUBLICATION DESIGN PRACTICE 101

 In the case of the day-to-day decision making, a morning production
meeting was used to co-ordinate and communicate the workflow. The
process operated essentially as a ‘federation’ of worker-managers who
met to confer on what was to be done. On many occasions interim
meetings of small working groups would be called to respond to issues
that emerged during the day. For instance if the paper stock required
to print a job was not available; or if work was proceeding more slowly
than expected, the sequence of work needed to be re-arranged.
Each worker was also responsible for his or her own training and
development, funded by the collective.

CRAFT OF PRODUCTION

Underlying the type of collective organisation that we built for

Backyard Press was a keen interest in the craft of printing and
publishing. Anson identifies this as: ‘an orientation towards, and a
capacity to take pleasure in, the physical production of (as it happened)
printed material’ (1984: 4).
This took in an experimental approach to the work that was done
outside of the commercial production process. In fact the knowledge
built up in both the commercial and experimental work contributed to
each other. Our close relations with commercial printers exposed us to
new techniques and resources; in turn the experiments in printing and
processes assisted our productivity in the commercial operation.
The spirit of experimentation extended to the way we worked
together and how we drew others into our orbit. It could be argued that
the organisation was keen to experiment with the material of human
interactions and interest in collaboration. The character of Backyard
Press could be defined as multi-vocal, reflecting the interests of each
of the workers and to some extent the people who congregated around
the press. It defied the notion of a ‘company style’, instead giving space

102 CO-CREATIVE PUBLICS AND PUBLICATION DESIGN PRACTICE

JOURNEY OF A WISE ELECTRON’
PETER LYSSIOTIS
PHOTOMONTAGE AND TEXT
CHAMPION BOOKS

CO-CREATIVE PUBLICS AND PUBLICATION DESIGN PRACTICE 103

 for many outcomes and personal expressions to emerge. Each person
provided a different view of the shared experience.
The group was nevertheless based on the common goal of creating
a model workplace that Anson describes as an ‘autonomous and
democratic work organisation’. It was enthusiastic (sometimes naively
so) open to new influences and prepared to risk its security.
An example of this character in the Backyard Press context was the
group the RASCALS. Most of the members had little design or print
production expertise. The design ideas were put forward by a member,
who then worked with someone with experience to produce it as a
printed artefact. In other words, the design conversation expanded to
include the non-expert.
The Backyard Press iteration of a collective structure could be
characterised as a collection of independent, yet highly interrelated
actors. Each actor needed an awareness of his or her own place in the
structure, through which he or she had an impact on the collective
structure and how it worked.

CHAMPION BOOKS’ ALTERNATIVE COLLABORATIVE STRUCTURE

Champion Books, on the other hand, had a different way of working

and organizational structure, which were the outcome of distinct
motivations. Champion Books was not commercial in the same way that
Backyard Press was. The group was motivated by the act of publishing
experimental works in different ways. As such, it was not necessary to
establish an efficient production system (in some senses chaos produced
the outcome we were aiming for). The people involved in Champion
Books were less concerned with the political imperative of forming
a collective. It was more organically collaborative, forming and re-
forming around whatever publication was in production at the time.
Once the decision was made to take on a publication and funds were
secure, the decision-making became the responsibility of the author or

104 CO-CREATIVE PUBLICS AND PUBLICATION DESIGN PRACTICE

project manager. As with the self-managed approach in Backyard Press,
this gave discretion to the person or people most involved.
Applying Anson’s ‘Sequence of Motives’ to Champion Books would
result in inverting the imperatives to read:
1. access to means of self-expression
2. exercise of craft in the production of printed material
3. broad congruence of extra-enterprise views and values
4. autonomous and democratic work organisation

While point four: autonomous and democratic work organisation,

was present in Champion’s structure it was incidental to the primary
aim of creating innovative publications; yet it was indicative of a co-
creative impulse within Champion Books. The collaborative work
process, albeit more fluid than that in Backyard Press, helped to make
the first three motives possible. Time was also a factor in the way
Champion Books was organized, as its publications took much longer
to produce than the work that went through Backyard Press. As a
result, the group would meet when necessary rather than regularly, and
the focus was seldom on the internal workings of the group.

AN ALTERNATIVE COLLABORATIVE ARRANGEMENT

The Champion group operated in a different manner from Backyard

Press. Initially there was an editorial group who oversaw the material.
Over time this changed towards a more conventional editorial
relationship, otherwise the group operated fairly loosely. The most
active person at any time tended to exert the most influence on what was
produced. Authors such as Peter Lyssiotis were drawn into the group for
the duration that their work was being produced. And many, like Peter,
would continue to contribute to the ongoing publication venture.
The output from Champion Books was not extensive. The production
was costly and long lead times were required to fit around the commercial

CO-CREATIVE PUBLICS AND PUBLICATION DESIGN PRACTICE 105

 demands of Backyard Press, demanding a high level of commitment from
the people involved. However, despite the scale of the output, Champion
Books managed to exert a reasonable impact on the local publishing
scene, and gave a few people a start in their own careers.

AUDIENCE PARTICIPATION: CO-CREATIVE PUBLICS

The experiences of social/production collectives that I related here

also indicate something about a participatory audience that exists
immediately outside of the core, work-based collective and its direct
community. This audience is once removed from the one that forms
the community. Yet, it exists because the people who constitute it,
pay attention to the artefacts (including the collective as an artefact
itself ) and are addressed by the artefacts. In other words, it forms what
Michael Warner (2002: 50) terms a public that is directly associated
with the press.
For example, the music posters printed at Backyard Press circulated
within the public domain. They appeared on walls and posts and were
displayed in public venues. In some cases they dominated the visual
environment due to their scale and number. Many in the general public
would only pay attention to them if they couldn’t avoid it. However, a
more specific audience relied on these posters for information, such as
what band was playing at a particular venue and date. This group became
a public for the poster as well as the musicians. The audience engaged
in a public-like discourse around the material, feeding information
into various networks. As Warner notes in his depiction of a public, the
people in this public can remain as strangers to each other.
The audience in Melbourne at the time was sufficiently large
that members may not have known each other. This is where, as
Milioni (2009: 276) points out, small, interconnected groups, which
nevertheless act independently of each other, form a larger networked
public. Network publics then create a rhizomatic channel through

106 CO-CREATIVE PUBLICS AND PUBLICATION DESIGN PRACTICE

which the discourse flows. That is, the people who link the networks
together act as conduits to ‘spread the word’, which then moves
through each hub.
So too the audience that congregated at one of Champion Books
book launches demonstrates this effect. It attracted not only to a
publication, but also to the live-ness of the event that surrounds the
publication. A small ‘world’ or culture of interconnected groups and
individuals develops around the artefact as it enters the world.
This culture allows the audience to participate actively as makers of
the culture through discourse, not merely as consumers of the artefact.
In a sense this audience represents the pre-consumer public sphere
that Habermas (1989: 150) describes, as a culture-debating rather than
culture-consuming public.
Looking at this audience I started to see the genesis of the type of
co-creative networked publics that are part of my argument about the
changing nature of the audience for publication design. Contemporary
participatory publication is possible within a community framework at
an intimate level, such as a defined online community.
It is also possible to envisage a networked public that is composed
of smaller distributed entities. The co-creative activities, in which this
audience participates, include designing and making in the case of
production-based publics; as well as discourse in the culture-making
publics.
In the next case study into Pool I develop the idea of several types
of co-creative public as a way to represent this levels of autonomous
making and/or discursive participation.

CO-CREATIVE PUBLICS AND PUBLICATION DESIGN PRACTICE 107

 CASE STUDY #3
RESEARCH AND REDESIGN PROJECT

ABC POOL

ABC POOL: RESEARCH AND

REDESIGN PROJECT
SECTION OF ‘THE WALL’ IN THE
RESEARCH STUDIO

108 CO-CREATIVE PUBLICS AND PUBLICATION DESIGN PRACTICE

The ABC Pool research project is the final Case Study of this
PhD. It was a field study into the redesign of a hybrid media
environment where conventional media and social media
intersect inside the national broadcaster, the Australian
Broadcasting Corporation (ABC). Pool is a social networking
site for storytellers and media makers and a hybrid of social
media, with a community of people attracted to the space;
and conventional media represented by the broadcaster.

In the review of this project I draw on the views that are articulated in
Chapter 2: Two Views on the Research, of the Design conversation and
Co-creative publics as a way to articulate the core argument of this
doctoral study.
I use this project in social and participatory media as an example
of future contexts and forms of publication design with a particular
focus on co-creation as a new design approach to publication
design. The concept of autonomous co-creative publics that I
developed throughout the study is used to describe the character of

This project has been carried out under the auspices of The Australasian CRC
for Interaction Design (ACID). They are part of a wider program of research
called Multi-User Environments, and are included under an RMIT Human
Research Ethics Committee application # HRESC-A-074-05/08

CO-CREATIVE PUBLICS AND PUBLICATION DESIGN PRACTICE 109

 the participatory audience. This type of audience is an outcome of
the development of media and design literacies coupled with lived
participatory experiences.
Further I review the Pool research in order to discuss how a designer
can transform from author to co-creator within a co-creative situation.
Two insights or discoveries in the Pool research, are the focus of this
Case Study. The first is identifying the role of Social Media Producer
as a way to describe the potential for the designer as a co-creator.
The role, as it operated in Pool, is an example of one that combines
professional practices and expertise with a direct interaction with non-
professional participants.
The second is recognizing Pool as a hybrid media space, which is
instructive as a way to understand a transition in practice and the
situation.
The Pool project was a funded collaborative inquiry undertaken
within the Australasian CRC for Interaction Design (ACID). I was
one of the Chief Investigators in the research team, and although
the overall expectations of the project are broader than my doctoral
investigation, I have used this project as a means to explore this
transformation of my practice and this possible new context for
practicing publication design. In the following pages I provide an
outline of the entire Pool project, to aid the reader in understanding the
complexity of the project, I then focus on my particular area of interest
as it relates to my doctoral investigations.
I conclude this chapter by drawing connections between the Pool
research and publication design from two perspectives. Firstly, the
design of discursive media spaces as publications. Secondly and more
broadly, how publication design is subject to similar forces to the ones
impacting on conventional media. That is, that the move towards a
participatory mode of communication is as prominent in publication
design as it is in contemporary media.

110 CO-CREATIVE PUBLICS AND PUBLICATION DESIGN PRACTICE

LINKS TO THE PREVIOUS CASE STUDIES

The Pool research and redesign project took forward the core
discoveries from the previous case studies. In the Design Audio Cloud
I concluded that a publication is the act of making thoughts, ideas,
opinions and stories public, and performed through conversation.
In Backyard Press and Champion Books I considered the way that
self-management in the collective workplace provides a model for
an autonomous co-creative practice. I also noted several forms of
audience participation that occurred around the collectives.
These themes recur in the Pool project, giving evidence of a new
expression of publication and publication design as a co-creative
and public activity. I use the experience at Backyard Press and
Champion Books collectives as a means to compare and contrast these
expressions over time and based in different technologies. That is, the
analogue print-based collaboration at Backyard Press and Champion
Books and the electronic web based co-creation of Pool.

CO-CREATIVE PUBLICS AND PUBLICATION DESIGN PRACTICE 111

 POOL RESEARCH PROJECT DESCRIPTION

I initiated and co-led the ABC Pool research project with colleague
Jeremy Yuille, and research assistants Chris Marmo and Reuben
Stanton. The project was commissioned by Pool and funded by ACID. It
was a collaborative effort by the research team across the breadth of the
research, with specific areas of expertise falling to each of us. Jeremy
Yuille managed the interaction research and design. Chris Marmo was
involved in user experience research. Reuben Stanton developed the
information architecture and visual design and I liaised with the ABC,
conducted stakeholder interviews and oversaw the project.
The research team was commissioned to make the Pool site legible.
Pool had developed in an ad hoc fashion as a beta, or prototype site.
People who used it regularly became familiar with its peculiarities and
knew what was possible on the site. But it wasn’t clear to many other
people, including those inside the ABC, what it was, how it worked or
what it represented. In this case, we defined legibility as: to know where
you are, who you are with and what you can do, immediately and at all
times; and to establish clarity of voice and movement through the site.
The first stage of the research concentrated on identifying the
motivations and behaviours of the people who populated the site and
identified as being part of the Pool community. The primary objective was
to design a satisfying user experience for this group, which would then
become a foundation for further improvements to attract new participants.
Ultimately we aimed for an integrated ‘lean-forward’ and ‘lean-
back’ experience. Lean-forward describes an active interaction on the
site, such as uploading a media piece or commenting on someone’s
work; whereas lean-back depicts the conventional media experience

112 CO-CREATIVE PUBLICS AND PUBLICATION DESIGN PRACTICE

ABOVE: THE REDESIGNED SITE,
LAUNCHED FEB 2011
BELOW: THE BETA SITE 2005-2001

CO-CREATIVE PUBLICS AND PUBLICATION DESIGN PRACTICE 113

 of watching, reading or listening. Both of these were valuable for the
success of the site by providing a variety of ways to use it, responding
to the inclination of each visitor.
To develop an understanding of each of the constituent groups in
and around Pool, we designed a research process based on interaction
design principles and methods. We interviewed several active members
of the site, as well as stakeholders in the ABC, such as the Pool team,
management personnel who had a direct interest in Pool and radio
producers who used Pool as an adjunct to their radio programs.
We conducted a user experience survey and observed users as they
navigated through the site. A set of artefacts, such as persona cards,
diagrams and maps, were designed to take the stakeholders through
our design response and interrogate the data using discussion,
diagrams and visual propositions (sketches and models) to reach our
conclusions and design proposal.
After analysing the data we set out to enhance the clarity of this
particular social media venture. The findings of our research were
manifested in the final information architecture and visual redesign
proposal for the new site, reflecting that Pool is an open platform where people
share media and collaborate on projects (from the homepage descriptor).
The key features that were highlighted in the research, namely
people, media and projects now form the navigation points for
moving through the site. The ABC accepted the interface design and
information architecture proposal, and implemented it in 2010. The
new site ([Link] went live on 21 February 2011.

ABC POOL: BACKGROUND

Pool was established by experimental radio makers in Radio National,

one of the stations on the national broadcaster. Experimental radio is
a recursive practice where radio artefacts, such as sound and word, are
explored in order to create new radio forms.

114 CO-CREATIVE PUBLICS AND PUBLICATION DESIGN PRACTICE

 The site’s founding executive producer, Sherre DeLys imagined
Pool as a ‘keeping place for experimental practice’ (DeLys 2009). The
Internet was seen as an alternative platform for experimental programs
on Radio National, which were being phased out of the programming
schedule. It was seen that the internet could, over time, support higher
fidelity programming and bring the audience into the program.
The format for Pool was developed in conjunction with a group of
media and design educators who formed the Pool Consortium. This
consortium was established in 2005 to confer on what this website
could be and how it could be built. The discussions in the group covered
the scope of the project, the technologies available at the time, and the
relationship with the ABC. From the outset there was an intention to
include media education in the mix of social media activities.
The original concept, formed in 2003 pre-dated the large-scale
iterations of social media such as YouTube (2005), Facebook (2004)
and MySpace (2006). There was no template for the format. However
Web 2.0 developments brought the component parts together to afford
more direct public participation in uploading content to the Internet.
As established by the Cosortium, the Pool’s aims were explicit: to
create a space where an audience could be brought into the creative
practice around media; to highlight the conversations around
experimental media ideas; and to connect Australian academic
institutions with the national broadcaster. The perceived value of the
university connection to the ABC was two-fold: it brought together
media researchers to consider imminent changes in media, made
possible by the emerging participatory cultures on the Internet.
The student population in university courses also held the promise
of developing a new, more diverse audience to what currently existed
for Radio National. A case was made that a new audience could
be generated by introducing tertiary students and other emerging
practitioners into Pool and thus to Radio National and the ABC.

CO-CREATIVE PUBLICS AND PUBLICATION DESIGN PRACTICE 115

 Initially, Pool was housed in Radio National which proved to
be successful, even thought at times it was a somewhat unlikely
affiliation. Radio National houses much of the ABC’s talk and cultural
programs. This located Pool in an established intellectual sphere of
thought and critique within the organisation.
The seemingly unlikely connection between an audio medium such
as radio and the text- and image-based Internet, provided a new way
to perceive the future of media production (at the time video was only
starting to emerge as a viable web medium).
The Consortium discussed issues ranging from how the ambience
of sound could be used to reconsider the fixity of image and text
(proposed by consortium member Brogan Bunt), through to the
unlocking of ABC archives through Pool (as put forward by members
Ross Gibson and Sherre DeLys) and issues of intellectual property
and sharing (raised by Greg Schiemer) (Delys 2007). These ideas were
strengthened by the group’s intention to create a different audience
experience through direct participation in making media. This
intention was initially seen as being driven by educational projects, but
this expanded as the site developed.
A pilot (or beta) version of the site was developed in 2006 as a proof-
of-concept, which was used to interest ABC management in extending
the trial. Pool has since been acknowledged in the ABC as a viable
research and development space to explore and report on issues of
social media production and audience engagement.
Pool is recognised as a predictive project: one that aims to spot
changes as they occur and to look ahead to what might be coming in
media practice (DeLys 2009). It has a remit to translate what is found in
the Pool experiment out to the rest of the broadcaster where applicable.
An active community of users had grown around the beta version.
Our research identified approximately 3000 in 2010 (in 2012 this
reached 6500) registered users, with around one-third of those

116 CO-CREATIVE PUBLICS AND PUBLICATION DESIGN PRACTICE

constantly or regularly active. A core group remains actively involved
on a regular basis, while others are intermittent.
The Pool population also receives stimulus from regular co-
productions by ABC radio producers and Pool. Radio producers
create ‘callouts’ which is essentially an open-ended recruitment for
contributions to a project theme. In a callout, audience members from
a producer’s radio program are brought together with Pool members
to work on themed projects. For example My Tribe was a project
themed around the concepts of interconnectedness, communities,
tribes and networks. The project was initiated by Kyla Brettle as part
of a co-production with ABC 360 Documentaries and the RMIT Media
Program. The My Tribe callout invited people to:

Join my pack, my posse, my people, my network, my mob, my family – MY

TRIBE. We will be calling all makers to explore the theme of ‘my tribe’

in a creative work that can be shared on the my tribe pool group as

part of a public exhibition. Works can be uploaded as audio, video,
text, still images or in any other form via a web-link. For time-based
work there is a limit of 10-minutes and text pieces must be 1000 words
or less. With your help the my tribe pool group will be a rich and
diverse public media experience for all (Brettle 2010).

Pool is a space for user-generated content (ugc). Members produce

and upload audio, visual and text files to the site. This is considered a
way to engage the audience as makers, providing a venue for a member
to display works.
The site supports the member whose ambition is to enhance his or her
own reputation as a media maker. Users can engage in Pool in a number
of ways: on callouts (a themed project initiated by ABC staff ); remix the
media that others provide; collaborate directly with others on the site; or
comment on works and participate in the discussions on the site.

CO-CREATIVE PUBLICS AND PUBLICATION DESIGN PRACTICE 117

 CREATIVE COMMONS ON POOL

To underpin the potential for collaboration, the Pool Team led the
development of an innovative legal agreement for a tailored Creative
Commons license for Pool. It was developed in conjunction with
Creative Commons Australia and the ABC Legal Division.
The Creative Commons (CC) license allows people in the Pool
community to share and re-mix each other’s media, thus facilitating
open collaboration. A Creative Commons license creates a set of
options that members can nominate to protect their intellectual
property and have their creative work attributed. The following excerpt
outlines the user’s options to license their work (accessed from www.
[Link] 06/08/2010):

At Pool you can select from the full spectrum of rights for your
contributions, from all rights reserved, to some rights reserved, to
no rights reserved.

You declare clearly what you permit to happen with your work; copy,
share, reuse and remix.

Whatever licence you choose, you’ll always be credited for your work.

All rights reserved: You have the option to put your work up under
full copyright - which means no remixes, and no redistribution
unless you give someone specific permissions.

The instruction details another four options open to the member to

select: Attribution (BY), Attribution Share-Alike (BY-SA), Attribution,
Non-Commercial, Share-Alike (BY-NC-SA), and Public domain
The tone of voice used in the description of the options highlights
the Pool Team’s informal and enthusiastic communication with
members of the Pool community. Nevertheless, it is also clear that the
intention to safeguard member’s rights has been addressed.

118 CO-CREATIVE PUBLICS AND PUBLICATION DESIGN PRACTICE

 The innovation encompassed by the Creative Commons License
helps to model the type of interaction that the Pool Team establishes
with its community. It builds a secure and open space in which people
can work. By communicating in a direct, informal and open way, the
site gives itself character.
Creative Commons is a copyright system that allows a creator to
license his or her work under a range of license types. The system
facilitates the type of media sharing that underpins Pool operations.
Creative Commons was an outcome of the Open Source movement in
the 1990s, which promoted sharing program code between technologists,
on the basis that once shared the work would be improved and feed back
into the community. Law students from the Harvard Law School took this
as framework to do the same with media artefacts (Bollier 2008).

CO-CREATIVE PUBLICS AND PUBLICATION DESIGN PRACTICE 119

 RESEARCH AND REDESIGN PROJECT

INTERACTIONS WITH POOL COMMUNITY AND STAKEHOLDERS WITHIN THE ABC

I led the liaison and communications between our research team and
the ABC, specifically the Pool Team (ABC staff overseeing the project).
This entailed Chris and I visiting ABC Sydney and interview 23 people
from the Pool Team, Radio National producers, representatives of
ABC Innovations, ABC Management and people from outside the ABC
who used Pool for education and research projects. Talks with ABC
management included speaking to the Managing Director and the
Head of ABC Radio.
In addition, we ran a workshop in Sydney that re-presented initial
research and design ideas back to the stakeholders. This was based on
the information we gathered and the ideas we were working with. I was
in regular contact with the Pool Team during the process, relating the
conversations back to the research team.
My own intention through the project was to explore the idea of
conversation as a medium. My key role in the research team was to
manage the communication between all parties involved in the project.
This gave me a central position from which to participate in and
observe the conversations that occurred in the project.
Jeremy Yuille led the interaction design research and development
of the site re-design. He bought a process to the project that utilises
visualisation of information (diagrams, images, maps) and making
artefacts (persona cards, mental model). These were used as ways to
think through the information, as well as to communicate the ideas
that emerged throughout the project.

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 Chris Marmo undertook user-experience research, and Reuben
Stanton was in charge of the interface design solutions. We were all
involved in the discussion around the current site and put forward
ideas for the proposed site structure.
The mix of people and expertise influenced the outcome, but
it should be noted that another team would might have come to
a different outcome. This is the subjective nature of the design
conversation in practice. It will always differ based on the context and
the participants.

COLLECTING THE DATA

The first stage of the project required us to examine how the existing
user experienced the site.
Over three days in June 2008 we held open-ended conversations with
stakeholders in Sydney and later over another day in Melbourne. Our
intention in these meetings was to collate a range of views and to dig
as deeply as possible into how the site satisfied or didn’t work for each
specific situation.
The research team concentrated on people who we felt, and were
advised, were key to the operation of Pool. It was necessary to talk to
management, who had strategic concerns around Pool and how it would
continue to interface with the conventional operations in the ABC.
The meetings also bought us into contact with those who were
using the site as a way to extend particular Radio National (RN)
radio programs into the social media space. These people were
gaining personal experience of working in social media, and had a
working knowledge of how the site performed from the back-end (the
administrator’s perspective).
We talked to educators and researchers who were using Pool for
other reasons, and who were following its development; and we
communicated with the Pool Team. These were the people who were

CO-CREATIVE PUBLICS AND PUBLICATION DESIGN PRACTICE 121

 managing Pool at the time and working out ways to make it more
responsive to the needs of the Pool community.
The range of people we spoke to led to a similar range of topics, in
and around Pool. The topics included the strategic viewpoint, such as
the desire on the part of the ABC to have a way to understand social
media from the inside; the funding required to produce Pool and how
that impacted on the rest of the organisation; and the other social
media instances that were occurring in the ABC.
The radio producers spoke of their experiences, both positive and
negative, of using the current site; how they felt about introducing an
audience into more direct contact with the radio-making process; and
the potential improvements that would make their role more efficient.
People who were using Pool from outside the ABC mentioned
ease of use; legibility; and the need to make the space relevant to
professional media makers as well as amateurs.
The Pool Team discussed innovations they were making to produce a
stronger user experience and the roles that each played in creating Pool.
These conversations aligned with my overarching idea of the design
conversation as being disparate and dissonant, but clearly focused on
moving towards a solution.

AN OBSERVATION ON THE LOCALITY

A tangential observation I made at the time was that the corridors

and offices were full of analogue studio equipment, which had been
replaced a few years earlier by new digital equipment. The equipment
was well designed and crafted, in the style of Swiss modernism of the
1960s that might have come from the Ulm School tradition.
Ulm was the home of a new generation of industrial and graphic
designers in the mid-2oth century. Ulm had a progressive charter,
connecting function and aesthetics, following on from early
modernism characterised by the Bauhaus school. The analogue control

122 CO-CREATIVE PUBLICS AND PUBLICATION DESIGN PRACTICE

desks and recording equipment have brushed aluminium knobs and
slides that could be turned and moved to affect the sound quality
required. The desks were finished in teak to give the sense of quality
and physical presence.
It was clear that there was still an attachment to these artefacts. They
had made their way from the corridors into the offices of the people who
had once used them on a daily basis. This suggested two things to me.
Firstly, a nostalgic link to a past practice that was characterised by
physicality (the manual action of turning knobs, rather than using a
screen and keyboard), and technology that was crafted to define the
working space to fit a practice (as opposed to the non-specific digital
screen and box, which could be used for any practice, from design to
medicine).
Secondly, it made me think that the attachment was to do with a role
itself. In other words, that the technology represented a clearly defined
role (such as radio producer) rather than the emerging fluidity of
practice that digital technology and a range of new demands on media
bought about.

CO-CREATIVE PUBLICS AND PUBLICATION DESIGN PRACTICE 123

 PANORAMA OF THE ‘WALL’
USED IN POOL RESEARCH AND
REDESIGN PROCESS

PROCESSING THE DATA

Following the workshop we returned to the research studio at RMIT

in Melbourne to compile and work with the initial data collected from
the interviews, online survey, and a number of user-experiences tests
that Chris Marmo conducted. A user experience test explores how an
advanced site user navigates the site and makes it work for them. He
also observed users who are new to the site and the type of navigation
moves they make to work their way through an operation.

THE WALL

Once compiled, we pinned the information to a wall in the research

studio. This allowed us to literally to see what ideas would surface.
Verbatim interview transcripts, survey results, quotes from the
participants and preliminary data graphs created the first layer of
information.

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 We then looked for connections that we could make between the
materials we were looking at. We noted the like comments (similar
issues raised by a variety of respondents); the ones that were surprising;
and what was not coming through but necessary to consider.
We used marking pens, post-it notes and diagrams to visualise the
connections, surprises and omissions. This part of the process was
compelling. The wall became an attraction in the studio; it took on an
organic sense of growth and emergence.
The space constructed gave the research team a way to communicate
with each other and explore ideas and it was possible to bring others
in and talk about the ideas that were coming through. Further, the
information and our scribblings created an artefact that later became a way
to take the stakeholders through the process and communicate the ideas.
A display wall is common in many design disciplines, such as
communication design, interaction design and others, to present

CO-CREATIVE PUBLICS AND PUBLICATION DESIGN PRACTICE 125

 ideas in a material form: text or image on paper, contained within
an observational space. The forms then seem to become ‘actors’
performing a role in the development of solutions. The ‘actors’
visualise information in a way that is easily comprehended, using
quantity and scale to depict commonality and intensity; connecting
lines represent links that appear between disparate responses. Thus
the wall can be used to identify like ideas, which can then be clustered
together (see Mental Model, below).

THE WALL AS A PUBLICATION

The wall became the first publication of the research. This type of
publication can become a primary model for mediated emergence.
That is to say that a level of mediation occurs in selecting the material
to display and the organisation of that material. Yet, it also allows
connections to form between the elements, which in turn can pose
solutions or ways towards solutions.
For example, quotes from participants were selected as key ideas and
highlighted by enlarging these and taking them out of their context
(within the verbatim speech). This represents a decision, similar to
design decisions that establish spatial hierarchy, or editorial decisions
about the prominence of certain ideas within a publication, yet these
decisions, while limiting some connections to form, enable others to
become obvious.
An instance of this is a quote by one participant who alluded to
wanting other people on Pool to engage with the ideas around a work
prompted discussion on participants’ motivations: “Things on Pool are
things you’ve thought about and want other people to think about”. In
this case the speaker emphasised sharing ideas. This opened up a line
of enquiry into what motivates people to join the Pool community.
Other comments and responses suggested that some participants were
motivated by having his or her works seen by ABC staff; still others aimed

126 CO-CREATIVE PUBLICS AND PUBLICATION DESIGN PRACTICE

SECTIONS OF THE ‘WALL’ USED IN
POOL RESEARCH AND REDESIGN
PROCESS

CO-CREATIVE PUBLICS AND PUBLICATION DESIGN PRACTICE 127

 to collaborate on making new works with people they met on Pool; and for
some it was a way to tell stories, incrementally and in a social space. We
noted too that some people joined Pool because of its strong connection to
the ABC and the ABC brand values of trust and collegiality.
Many of these ideas were either reinforced or challenged as we
delved further into the material on the wall. Gradually a picture
emerged of a community that was shaped by its conditions, including
the lack of functionality, yet one that was also determined to optimise
the situation and find ‘work-arounds’ to make things happen. In other
words the community had developed the ethos of a shared space,
which had its own conventions and codes.
As new material was generated, diagrams, stories and notes, for
example, they were added to the wall, further refining some concepts
and opening up others. We noted that the wall, representing a stage
in the design process, at this point became as Tonkenwise points to:
‘a partner in the process, dialoguing with the designer, helping to
articulate what the design should be’ (Tonkenwise 2007: lecture).
This interaction occurred between the research team and the wall,
with which we had now become familiar. However, the wall also
became a way for us to articulate what we were finding in the research
and processing stage. In other words, the conversation reached out
to others who were attracted to the ideas being generated, and the
physical and visual space that the wall created.
The wall became our first publication of the findings, and a place
we could test the ideas with others. We used this aspect of the wall at a
workshop with stakeholders, which I detail later in this section.

INQUIRING MATERIALS

In the next phase of the poject we produced a set persona cards to

further interrogate the research data. Personas are used in interaction
design to create a more clearly defined sense of a user. The word

128 CO-CREATIVE PUBLICS AND PUBLICATION DESIGN PRACTICE

 Alex Penny Lara Ken
Alex has been working at Radio National Penny is a 44 year old producer for the Lara is a 26 year old community Ken has taught media arts and
and in broadcasting for 20 years weekly program ‘360’ on Radio National manager at Pool UTS for the past 6 yea

Astrid Mollie Sam Ruth

Astrid is a 21 year old from Mudgee, Mollie is a 32 year old freelance film Sam is a 39 year old process engineer at Ruth is a 58 year old semi-re
studying journalism/media arts at UTS producer a Zinc refinary in Townsville teacher from Dandeno

PERSONA CARD [FRONTS] AND

INFORMATION GRAPHICS AND
DIAGRAMS FROM POOL RESEARCH
PHASE

Pool has 1621 172 have made

registered users
4% to get recognition from other users What is your main
reason for using Pool?
1055
comments 10 people
6% to find other artists I can collaborate with

6% to feel part of a community

10 comments

10 items 8% to find inspiration

average file size

160 have never logged in 10% other

484 have uploaded

499 680
415kb 699kb
12% to get recognition from the ABC
129 have been active
in the past 6 weeks audio
images 16% to give my work a chance of being used by the ABC

422
47 web links
38% It’s a place to display my work

1928 items
7924kb
text
250
videos

405kb

CO-CREATIVE PUBLICS AND PUBLICATION DESIGN PRACTICE 129

 persona derives from the Latin for a kind of mask made to resonate
with the voice of the actor (per sonare meaning “to sound through”).
A persona card uses common characteristics, motivations and
behaviours shared by a number of people and personifies them into a
fictional, but realistic character profile.
Several persona cards were written and produced to represent the
key motivations and behaviours we found. These profiles then become
reference points, similar to the guiding principles, to test design
solutions by building likely scenarios (see below).
The profiles below give a sense of the process as well as the
participants. One persona card, for example, is for Astrid who posts
work to the site on a regular basis. She might be motivated to be
working in a space managed by the ABC, with the potential to have
work featured by an ABC professional. Astrid’s persona card describes
her interests and behaviours:

Astrid moved to the city a few years ago, and uses sites like Facebook
to share photos and to keep in touch with family and friends from
back home. She lives in a share house with 2 other students - there’s
no TV in the house, but they all have laptops.

She and her friends in Sydney often meet between classes and after
school, where they talk about uni work, travel and their careers.
Astrid has mentioned her plans to study abroad for a semester next
year - an idea her friends are encouraging.

After uni, she has her sights firmly set on a career in the media,
and is trying to build a solid portfolio and gain relevant experience
before she finishes her studies. She enjoys receiving constructive
feedback, although she’s always a little apprehensive before
showing her work to others (excerpt from Astrid persona card,
written by Chris Marmo)

130 CO-CREATIVE PUBLICS AND PUBLICATION DESIGN PRACTICE

 Another card was for an independent filmmaker Mollie, who uses
the site to get a sense of what is being produced in the social media
space. She may not be interested in posting work, but could provide
opportunities to young filmmakers:

Mollie is a 32 year old film producer. She is a sole trader, but shares
studio space with some friends who work in the same industry.
She tends to work autonomously, but she can usually rely on her
studio-mates to pull together when she needs it. She is a member of
Screenhub, an industry website that posts jobs, industry news and
has a comprehensive directory of practitioners. She is a bit tired of
having to go through a producer to find contacts, and thinks places
like Screenhub are great (excerpt from Mollie persona card, written
by Chris Marmo).

The personas are fictional profiles, compiling like data from the
people we spoke to and putting it into a knowable form. The personas
become useful when trying to test an idea or design solution. To take
this further scenarios are developed and explored: Does Astrid know
how to get her work viewed by an ABC staff producer, what role do
comments play in developing her ideas and media work, and is she
familiar with social media conventions such as privacy and licensing
settings? Or, how would Mollie want the site to operate, what does
she need to find, and how easy is it for her to get to the media she is
looking for?
Each of these questions has a response that can direct a potential
technology solution. For example, the new site is designed to allow ABC
staff to follow people in their Project, enabling Astrid’s work to come to
the fore and possibly being featured on the frontpage; or Mollie’s need to
easily find media is improved by the new search facilities.

CO-CREATIVE PUBLICS AND PUBLICATION DESIGN PRACTICE 131

 GUIDING PRINCIPLES

As a result of the users community and stakeholder responses we

developed a set of guiding principles, fashioned to direct the redesign
process. The principles are used as reference points. When a solution
is posed it can be checked against the guidelines to ensure that it
complies with the principle. Note: further description is added in
square brackets in the listing on the opposite page.

SYDNEY WORKSHOP

Before beginning the task of redesigning the site we felt it important

to take the research findings back to the stakeholders. This produced
a cyclical communication process, bringing them back into the
conversation. It also helped to refine the ideas to ensure they were optimal.
In other words, could we communicate the ideas effectively and gain
support, and had we covered the aspects that the stakeholders thought
were essential to Pool working to its maximum potential?
Reporting back to the ABC stakeholders was done in a workshop
format, engaging the participants to use the persona cards and work
through a variety of scenarios. In effect we were reproducing some
of the process that we used to arrive at the ideas, thereby opening
the process up to others. It had two effects: firstly, to invite others to
contribute to the project in a structured way (the response was valuable
to refining ideas); secondly, it meant the participants understood
the intention of the research and redesign (thereby making the final
proposal sensible and comprehensible).
At the workshop we presented an overview of what we found in the
research stage; images of the wall to explicate the process we had been
through, the persona cards, diagrams of relationships, motivations
and behaviours of the current community that we observed, and a
mental model of the information and how motivations and behaviours
related to technology functions.

132 CO-CREATIVE PUBLICS AND PUBLICATION DESIGN PRACTICE

GUIDING PRINCIPLES

Make Pool legible:

To know where you are, who you are with and what you can do, immediately and
at all times
Clarity of voice and movement through the site [voice here refers to how Pool
‘sounds’ to its users. Each social media site projects itself differently, and so can
be read as a distinct text, within a network of texts]

Lower the barriers to entry:

Minimise any unnecessary restrictions to becoming a member of Pool, simplify
processes and build in opportunities to participate regularly throughout the site

Set defaults to public and transparent:

The default state is public/open unless the owner opts to make a work,
contribution or project closed [Default refers to the state that is set as the
automatic option in the application; a user is required to deliberately choose an
alternative option]
All behaviours and interactions on Pool default to transparent [e.g. an ABC staff
member is identified by the ABC lissijous ( ) attached to their comment, making
their position apparent; or, if a member opts to follow another person on the site,
an email notification is sent to the person concerned]

Make Pool sustainable

Optimise the site for current users:
Redesign the site to enhance the experience and facilitate the activities of current
members [to both reward the community for the effort they have made, as well
as prompting word-of-mouth promotion of the ease of experience]
Promote member’s ‘reputation’ [make the site a valuable place to contribute to]
Clarity of pathways for communication, connections and personal and
professional outcomes [to assist in making the site legible], and

Lay the groundwork to attract new audiences/new practices:

Utilise the conventions of social media to create a personal experience of the site
[using features developed elsewhere in soicla media operations to emphasise the
personality of Pool]
Create an intelligent space: develop ease of entry, ease of use, and clarity of
opportunity [to take away awkward functionality and make it satisfying, thus
more attractive to new users].

CO-CREATIVE PUBLICS AND PUBLICATION DESIGN PRACTICE 133

 Jeremy Yuille created a ‘mental model‘. A mental model brings
together the things that people do (green in the image above), in
whatever way they can on the site, and looks for the functions that
support that activity (blue in the image). This highlights the functions
that must be kept and enhanced, It also shows where the gaps are.
For example, communication on the site is essential to satisfy the
desire to ‘have someone think about a work’ and then to communicate
those thoughts to the creator. The mental model uses a clustering
process that draws together ‘like’ activities and functions. The final
stage was to condense this into simple and knowledgeable areas (black
blocks). In this case we came up with four key motivations within the
community, namely to: produce something; gather interesting stuff;
belong to a media community and be part of the ABC.
Following the workshop we processed the responses we gained from
the participants and moved to the final stage, namely to redesign the
site structure and interface.

INTERIM REPORT TO STAKEHOLDERS

A report was produced and presented back to the ABC (see Key
Recommendations on following page). The report contained our
key findings to date as well as several recommendations, which I
will discuss here. The key recommendation was to redesign the site,
whilst optimising it for the current users, with the intention of laying
groundwork for future development. We found that confusion about
what Pool was, came about because of a plethora of functions and
disparate spaces, which did not appear to connect with each other.
To make the site legible we determined to simplify the way the site
operates, collapsing like functions into fewer and more consistent
options, building a comprehensible experience using the site. Further,
we aimed to define spaces on the site that highlighted People, Media,
Projects and the ABC.

134 CO-CREATIVE PUBLICS AND PUBLICATION DESIGN PRACTICE

MENTAL MODEL OF POOL DATA,
DEVELOPED BY JEREMY YUILLE
PHOTO REUBEN STANTON

Along with this, we felt it important to point to the fact that the
community represented media makers, rather than artists, hence
defining Pool as a media site.
In addition we noted that Pool offered opportunities to the ABC, as
a research and development space that could inform other ABC social
media productions.
Finally, we put forward the notion that Pool holds a unique position
in the international media landscape. It sits at the intersection between
conventional media and social media in a way that we did not find
elsewhere. This point is significant to this study. It locates a space (the
intersection) as a research site in itself, worthy of investigation.

CO-CREATIVE PUBLICS AND PUBLICATION DESIGN PRACTICE 135

 REDESIGNING THE SITE INTERFACE AND INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE

The research phase produced an insight into Pool from many and
disparate perspectives. The challenge was to provide a solution that
would go some way to satisfying the hopes of the respondents, while at
the same time keeping a close eye on the whole picture.
We decided to limit the redesign proposal by setting the priority as
optimising the site for its current community. That meant that some
advanced improvements were held off until this first priority was
reached. The decision was contentious and in a way contradicted the
culture of making improvements on a regular basis that had developed
in Pool till then. Nevertheless, as the core commission was to make
Pool legible, it was essential to return to the guiding principles
regarding legibility:

To know where you are, who you are with and what you can do, immediately
and at all times, and
Clarity of voice and movement through the site

Each of the principles, above, implies that Pool should present itself
and what a user can do on the site clearly and explicitly. Indeed,
Pool becomes a ‘text’ that can be read. This could be compared to
a magazine cover, which makes it clear to the potential buyer what
is inside the publication, who publishes it, and in some way gives a
reason to purchase the publication. Except that in this case the site
aims to engage the viewer to participate at some level. As with the
magazine, these notions can be expressed visually and in the design
structure as well as the words used on the cover.
These key motivations were distilled into nodes, which provide
visual and information architecture solutions. A definition of a node
is an active electronic device that is attached to a network, and is
capable of sending, receiving, or forwarding information over a
communications channel.

136 CO-CREATIVE PUBLICS AND PUBLICATION DESIGN PRACTICE

INTERIM REPORT TO STAKEHOLDERS
Pool has a vibrant community but is being held back by the current website
design
Recommendations:
1. Optimise the site for the current community, addressing existing design and
usability issues, and communicating the Pool purpose clearly
2. Re-design the site to visually and structurally emphasise people,
communications, and community
Pool is a media site populated by people who are passionate about what they
create and want to engage with and belong to a diverse media community
Recommendations:
1. The role of Community Manager be designated and resourced to generate
community identity, interaction, collaboration and connection to the ABC.
2. Pool community members be invited to become community managers of
their own interest groups. Training resources to be developed and provided to
interested members
3. ABC Producers to be resourced to continue their involvement in Pool to build
their expertise in community engagement
Pool is a key to building other audiences
Recommendations:
1. The Executive Producer and others continue to develop contacts with tertiary
and other educational institutions, festivals and other events that attract new
audiences
2. An appropriate marketing campaign be developed for the launch of the re-
designed site to build awareness of Pool to new target audiences
Pool is a method that could be used as the basis for participatory media in the
ABC
Recommendations:
1. Pool be considered by the Regional Media Hub program as an exemplar project
for participatory media. Pool has significant intelligence on how to build and
stimulate media communities
2. The ABC brand and values be evident on the site to depict the ABC as a
significant partner in the community
Pool is situated at the intersection of conventional broadcasting media and
participatory media
Recommendations:
1. Pool continue to engage with media researchers to observe and understand
the significance of these developments
2. Opportunities for continued partnerships between Pool and tertiary
institutions be developed

CO-CREATIVE PUBLICS AND PUBLICATION DESIGN PRACTICE 137

 Translating a human motivation into an electronic and visual
device concerns both interaction design (the conversion of a human
interaction into an electronic function) and communication design
(the visual text that communicates the intention).
We proposed four nodes to represent the motivations and to use as
electronic devices (navigation buttons) in the site redesign. The first
iteration was to define the nodes as: People; Works; Projects; and the
ABC (to be represented by the ABC brand lissijous). This was further
refined and rearranged as Media; Projects; People and the ABC. In the later
case the ABC was also to be represented by global header and footer
navigation bars, common to all ABC sites.
Media represented the media works that people upload to the site
(produce something). These were text, image, video, and sound files.
As Pool’s intention is for people to share works, and progress their
own work in response to comments from others, this space is designed
to be easy to use, with a number of functions that promote sharing,

FIRST ITERATION OF THE

PROPOSED NODES FOR POOL
REDESIGN.
DIAGRAM BY JEREMY YUILLE

138 CO-CREATIVE PUBLICS AND PUBLICATION DESIGN PRACTICE

POOL HOME PAGE SHOWING:
ABC BRAND AND MEDIA,
PROJECTS AND PEOPLE
NAVIGATION SYSTEM

favouriting and notifications about activity around the media.

Projects (gather interesting stuff ) is the space that defines Pool most
clearly. It is what happens on Pool compared to Media and People, which
come onto Pool as external influences. The Project space aggregates
several operations that are separate on the existing site: call-outs,
discussions, groups, forums and news. I discuss this space as a sample
of a publication in the Analysis below.
People was a way to bring the personal side of pool to the surface
(belong to a media community)
ABC (be part of the ABC) acknowledges that the ABC attracts people
to the site. While not all members are enticed by the proximity to the
ABC, many are drawn to the brand principles that the ABC contributes,
namely trust and security (where there is a policy that protects media
production and distribution); collegiality, which proposes a sharing
and discursive space for members to work in; and critical intellectuality
that supports ideas and critique around them.
CO-CREATIVE PUBLICS AND PUBLICATION DESIGN PRACTICE 139
 COMPLETION OF THE POOL PROJECT

The design proposal was accepted by the ABC, under the new
Multiplatform Division (Radio) and implemented in 2010. The site
went live in February 2011.
I have been involved in the final stages of meeting with the ABC
project manager and the web developers commissioned to complete
the work. This entailed translating the design intentions and
specifications we put forward. This again was a communication issue,
requiring detailed discussion (two meetings over 5 hours) on what a
specific design instruction means. That is, both what is the intention
behind the specification as well as what technology function could
be used to achieve the desired result. Each technology function then
needs to be referred back to the guiding principles to ensure it does
not contradict the underlying aims of creating a default position that
privileges openness and transparency.
The web developers converted the Design Specification Document
into Functional Specification and Process Flows documents. Each of
these articulates the plan that the developers use to implement the site
design. It is essential that agreement be reached at this point to ensure
confident progress through the final design stage.

SUMMARY OF THE POOL RESEARCH PROJECT

The full research project involved working through the brief, which
specified making Pool legible to its users, the stakeholders within and
outside the ABC and to the media research community in general. To
achieve this we fashioned a process of inquiry, prototyping, testing and
communication.
This was based on principles of interaction, web and
communication design. Interaction design principles ensured that the
design solution was based on the experiences of members of the Pool
community, and in-conjunction with the community. It was essential

140 CO-CREATIVE PUBLICS AND PUBLICATION DESIGN PRACTICE

that the redesign should reflect the motivations, behaviours and
aspirations of those involved directly.
Converting these dimensions of human interactions to a web design
involved working closely with the web developers to translate the
guiding principles that we established into a comprehensive set of
internet functions that would encourage rather than impede on-site
collaboration and communication.
Communication design, and in particular the design of
communicative spaces underpinned the research approach. This
included not only the web interface and structure as a design
artefact, but significantly the design of the communication that led
to the project outcome. In other words, the data collection via the
conversations with stakeholders; processing that data via the wall
and inquiring materials; re-presenting the interim findings back to
stakeholders in a workshop, which in turn acted as a communication
channel; and working with the developers to interpret the ideals that
emerged in the research all relied heavily on communication design.
I regard the full Pool research and redesign project as a
‘publication’. That is, that not only is Pool a publication of
participatory contributions; but importantly that the research project
was an ‘act of making public’, which is inherent to publication design.

CO-CREATIVE PUBLICS AND PUBLICATION DESIGN PRACTICE 141

 DISCOVERIES

THE ROLE OF SOCIAL MEDIA PRODUCER

In the Pool research I noticed a new hybrid role had emerged out of the
intersection of conventional and social media space mentioned above.
The role of the social media producer (SMP) is a fusion of professional
practitioner and a ‘prosumer’ (producer-consumer) or ‘pro-am’
(professional-amateur).
Initially, I didn’t realise the depth of the innovation that the Pool
team fashioned out of the now conventional role of (social media)
community manager. In discussions with Kyla Brettle, a colleague
from radio journalism who had initiated participatory projects on Pool,
I began to see the dimensions of the role.
Kyla Brettle had come to a similar conclusion in the research she was
doing into online music features. Since then, she and I have developed
a taxonomy of the role. This was taken into an educational research
project: Future Makers, Future Markets, which further describes the
position and its implications.

MEDIATION

The title ‘social media producer’ appears contradictory. The role

fuses the open-ended, participatory and messy, free-for-all in social
media, with the direction and mediation offered by a producer in a
conventional or industrial broadcast situation.
At a closer look, however, this title points to an advantage of
providing professional mediation within a co-creative situation. The
fusion has the potential to create something new.

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 The mediated outcome produced by the SMP, could be to develop
the production values in a media piece to produce a radio segment,
played on one of the associated radio programs; or an online feature on
Pool itself. Alternatively, the work could be part of a collaboration and
generate a new work.
It is this role that alerted me to the potential of combining audience
contribution with the direction and/or production expertise of a
professional to co-create an outcome.
In the research into the Pool community, we found many
contributors were motivated to join Pool in order to be in proximity to
the ABC and its professional staff.
The role of the producer is reciprocally reconfigured in this hybrid
relationship. Some new attributes are required by someone working
across the spaces; while others, normally needed for broadcast
production, are not useful in the participatory media space. The
communication designer could have a similar experience in the same
situation.
The SMP role has several expressions on Pool. The first is the ABC
staff member who runs Pool as the community manager. She oversees
all the interactions on Pool and makes connections; puts people in
touch with each other; and organizes the project schedule. Her role is
a management one, setting the conditions in which other things can
happen.
The second is a radio producer who sets up a callout and then
manages the callout community. A radio producer synchronizes the
theme of the callout with the theme of his or her radio program.
Pool members and people in the radio audience are invited to
respond to the theme with text, audio, image or video works. It is the
producer’s job to find things within that community which can re-
formed for the radio program or used for another outcome.
The radio producer will work with the media maker who submits the

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 piece to improve the work and its production values. Commenting on
specific works and negotiating with the creator or creators, achieves
this improvement.
The third is someone in the community who takes it on themselves
to stimulate interactions, move between projects and develop a sense
of place. This is the community member who now performs a guidance
role on the site. He or she might crossover several projects and look
for synergies, or provide resources, information, tips or comments to
move a project forward, or alternatively find a project that had started
to peter out and re-invigorate it.

RADIO PRODUCER > SOCIAL MEDIA PRODUCER

The radio producer in their conventional position commissions

people to provide the necessary expertise: sound engineers, recording
specialists, writers and so on, to realize a project. The producer also
arranges interviews with people who can contribute to the program
content. There is a professional level of collaboration in the role, and
each participant is expected to know how and when to contribute.
As the radio producer moves into the social media space, the
conventional scene of radio practice changes. Here the collaborators
necessitate a different type of interaction.
The media that is produced in response to a ‘callout’ may not be
what the producer expected, and the working habits of the community
member do not necessarily align with those of the production unit.
Unlike a radio program, social media is not constrained by a
timeline, there is not a fixed schedule in which the work appears. Nor
do the media works have a definable end point.
The life of a media work can extend past the date it is uploaded
and viewed. The interactions, such as comments, remixes and so on,
around a piece of media become a part of that media, and the idea of
extracting an artefact out of that situation is less easily achieved.

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A HYBRID MEDIA SPACE

Pollyanna Ruiz, in her article Walking the Net: Smooth Space and Alternative
Media Forms (Ruiz 2008), employs the concept of striated and smooth
spaces, as proposed by Giles Deluze and Felix Guatarri to distinguish
different media spaces.
The model is useful here to understand where Pool is located on
the media spectrum. Conventional media operates in a striated space,
which can be represented by parallel lines arranged vertically to depict
managerial hierarchy, as well as production and communication-flows.
Social media, on the other hand, can be seen as rhizomatic, flatter and
horizontal, with a less hierarchical structure. The intensity of activity
rather than a pre-determined form shapes the smooth space.
Pool represents the intersection of striated and smooth spaces,
creating a hybrid site, influenced by both spaces, yet with its own
characteristics and modality.
In this study I have used the research into the Pool site, and in
particular this hybrid space, as a means to investigate and consider
what could be learnt for publication design.
Ruiz uses Deluze and Guatarri’s concept of the striated and smooth
space to analyse two left-wing political news outlets: The Socialist
Worker newspaper and the Greenham Common newsletter, Greenham
Factor (Ruiz 2008: 178).
Her example is instructive for this review of Pool’s place in the media.
It highlights that the difference between the level of participation in
each instance, and how participation is structured determines the nature
of the publication. This is instructive as a way to analyse the effect of
participation on the form and character of a publication.
The Socialist Worker takes a conventional (if counter-political)
position, modelling its approach on traditional newspaper production.
It has a strong editorial imperative (the Party line) and offers little
room for contribution from people outside the editorial team.

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 The layout mimics a standard newspaper format. The information
is divided into sections such as news and opinion. The imagery is
conventionally applied rather than being used as a means to enhance
the communication of ideas and information. In this case participation
is controlled and restricted by the editorial structure.
The Greenham Factor newsletter on the other hand is based on a
feminist, non-hierarchical and inclusive paradigm. A group of women
who blockaded an American nuclear missile base in Greenham
Common, Berkshire, England from 1982-2000 produced the
Greenham newsletter (Hipperson 1982).
The design was deliberately and assertively unmediated with the
contributions directly laid out on the page without ‘sections’, dictated
styles or other publication layout devices. The design decision, put
simply, was to remove, as much as possible, the imposition of a design
structure that would limit participation.
These two examples depict publications that are essentially different
in the way they are designed and operated that extends well beyond
how they look. While they are clearly not the radio and internet media
that Pool represents, they do, I think, highlight the influences and
tensions between striated and smooth spaces in a hybrid site.

THE ABC CONVENTIONAL MEDIA AND ABC POOL SOCIAL MEDIA

The ABC differs from both open-ended, participatory media as well as

other mainstream media organisations, such as commercial television
and newspaper companies. The ABC as the national broadcaster
operates to a charter that, in part, states its aims as:
(a) to provide within Australia innovative and comprehensive
broadcasting services of a high standard as part of the Australian
broadcasting system consisting of national, commercial and
community sectors and, without limiting the generality of the
foregoing, to provide:

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 (i) broadcasting programs that contribute to a sense of national
identity and inform and entertain, and reflect the cultural diversity
of, the Australian community; and

(ii) broadcasting programs of an educational nature (ABC 1983).

In other words, the ABC responds to a non-market demand to

provide a broad ‘voice’ to a culturally diverse society. Notwithstanding
this, it does share a conventional production and distribution model
with commercial media producers.
Information is gathered by its employees, processed into news,
current affairs or entertainment and then broadcast to the audience.
Some level of audience interaction is included in the model (e.g.
talkback radio and comments online), and conventional measurements
such as ratings and focus groups are used to ascertain audience
response to individual radio or television programs.
The structure is conventionally structured into production schedules
(dailies and weeklies production clusters) and line-of-command
communication channels.
Pool, on the other hand, follows many of the newly minted social
media conventions, namely: open participation by the audience/
makers; a flatter organisational structure; less mediation of content;
and minimal direction of the production and communication flow.
Pool is therefore closer to the collective principles of smooth space
structures. Yet Pool sits within the broadcaster as a production unit,
subject to the same editorial and legal policies as the radio, television
and online divisions within the ABC. As I’ve mentioned, initially
Pool was housed within ABC Radio National. More recently it has
come under the auspice of the newly formed Multiplatform Division,
Radio. Pool is staffed by employees of the ABC, and is a recurrent
item in the Division’s budget. In other words, Pool sits between the
internal accountability of the ABC and the open and comparatively

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 unmediated interaction of external social media conventions. Some
accommodation has been made within the ABC to allow Pool to
perform within both.
For example a Creative Commons schedule was developed for
Pool users to nominate how their creative works are to be used by
others. The Pool team, Creative Commons Australia and the ABC
Legal Division, negotiated the schedule to recognise the dual needs of
protecting intellectual property rights while at the same time allowing
media to be shared for collaborative outcomes.
Other policies such as editorial moderation and the use of archival
material, for example, were developed to take account of the needs of
the broadcaster and the Pool community. These policies incidentally
feed back as practices into the broadcaster, as well as the broader social
media, environment. The hybridity of the Pool site is born out by the
finer details of the relationship between the two spaces. It also points
to some of the tensions between conventional and emergent practices.

SOCIAL MEDIA AS A DISRUPTION TO CONVENTIONAL PRACTICE

In the case of the Pool site, the tensions, such as legal and editorial
policies, can be worked through and compromise solutions found. It is
still the case, however, that there are fundamental differences between
the way conventional or industrial broadcasting, and social media
relate to their respective audiences.
Social media, the online facility that allows people to interact
with each other directly poses a threat to conventional media,
which is built on highly mediated meaning-making. Social media
alters the information and communication flow in essential ways.
Communication (information, news and so on) flows more directly
through individuals who produce and share source material with each
other and the broader audience.
As a many-to-many distribution system it counters the one-to-many

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broadcast model of conventional media. For example the Indymedia
movement mentioned earlier, allows participants to upload news
stories, videos and audio to the site ([Link]
en/[Link]). The site acts as a repository of these stories from
citizen journalists, and as a distributor that moves the information
to members and other media outlets. The audience in social media
has the opportunity to participate in making the media as well
as contributing to the media channel, the social media website.
Conventional or industrial media on the other hand limits audience
participation to relatively controlled instances such as talkback, reality
television programs and more recently, web forums and chat rooms
attached to a particular television or radio program.
While this distinction begins to blur as media organisations
attempt to integrate social and conventional media platforms, Pool
still remains an example of a genuine hybrid site. The venture benefits
from depth of practice in both conventional media, represented by the
radio producer and program maker; as well as the social media activist,
represented by active community members.
Social media has the potential to put pressure on the dominant media
by undercutting the way information and communication circulates
through society. Clayton M. Christensen in The Innovator’s Dilemma: when
new technologies cause great firms to fail poses an analogy to this situation
(Christensen 1997). In his book he characterizes the disruption that
can occur when an inferior technology overwhelms an existing one, by
offering a more compelling alternative to a public. For example, the
mobile phone lacked many of the capabilities of fixed line telephony
when it was introduced. Yet the attraction of mobility rather than fixed
location telecommunication drove its development to a point where it is
now starting to dominate the field.
If we apply this to social media, we see it does not have the same
resource structure, infrastructure or reach of mainstream media.

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 Whereas mainstream media employs many professionally trained staff
(designers, journalists, producers, photographers, directors, actors
and so on), social media currently relies largely on an amateur and pro-
amateur base.
Mainstream media has, for example, foreign correspondent desks in
many parts of the world. Social media depends on people who happen
to be on the ground at the time of an event, who can report and upload
stories to the Internet.
While these conditions are changing as social media begins to
become a dominant force, the attraction of social media lies elsewhere.
It has the appeal of participation and sociability. It provides alternative
ways for people to collectively create meaning, less fettered by external
mediation; and it currently has a strong ethos of free use (financially
free as well as free to participate).
Social media conflates the way a media object and it’s meaning are
created: it can be both produced and consumed by the same person
(thus inference and interpretation are commonly produced by maker
and audience). In addition a site like Facebook becomes the primary
context for the opinions and information expressed on the site. Social
media then fits within the broader context of the public sphere, which
is reciprocally influenced and extended by it.
Thus, social media on the one hand unsettles the status quo in
mainstream media, while on the other hand, it can be subject to
control and influence by existing, dominant economic and political
forces. The disruptive agency that social media brings to the situation
is pervasive and sudden.
Evidence of the surge of social media can be seen in the efforts made
by mainstream media, corporations and governments to engage with
their publics via social platforms. Mainstream media is recalibrating its
relationship with its publics as a response. However, it is clear as well that
mainstream media maintains the dominant position as media provider.

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 It is unclear at this nascent stage of social media, of how extensive
and long lasting the changes brought about by social media will be.
This is one reason why a hybrid site such as Pool is interesting.
Clearly Pool will not seriously threaten its host, the ABC, as the
demand for social networking does not challenge the demand for
professionally produced broadcast material. Yet Pool, and its location
at the intersection between the conventional and social media,
highlights the tensions and opportunities that exist at this juncture of
the two spaces.

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 ANALYSIS OF THE POOL RESEARCH

In this next section I analyse the discoveries from the Pool project
against the framework outlined in Chapter Two. This final project
provided me with the opportunity to explore a live co-creative situation.
I extrapolate what the discoveries mean for a publication designer
working in a co-creative context.

THE DESIGN CONVERSATION

DISSONANCE AND THE PROCESS OF LISTENING THROUGH INTERACTION

Conversations were used as the method to collect the bulk of the

data in the project. Interviews were conducted with several people in
the Pool team and the Pool community, key strategic stakeholders from
the ABC, and people from outside who used the site for research and
education purposes.
Following this, back in the studio, extensive conversations were
engaged in to process the information into something we could
know about Pool. These discussions formed a sense of the design
conversation I outline in this study. The design conversation
encapsulates the visual and textual language in a design situation.
My research into the design conversation gave me a way to read the
situation. I characterize the design conversation as dissonant and
dialogic. Each of these characteristics was evident in Pool, and
valuable to the research and design process.

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DISSONANCE

The Pool site is dissonant, full of disparate voices, expressing different

motivations and speaking about a variety of behaviours. We spoke to
twenty-three people initially, twelve at a subsequent workshop at ABC
Sydney; received 74 online survey responses; and observed eight user
trials. The full set of consultations came from people in the following
groupings:
The Pool team are employed in the ABC to produce Pool. They
include the Executive Producer, whose role is similar to an executive
producer on radio. He or she has oversight of the space and manages
interaction with the parent organisation, the ABC. The team includes
several social media producers, whose role is part community
manager, part producer. Other members provide technical and content
input into the site, and interns regularly work on Pool.
One aim of the Pool team, during this research phase, was to
make sense of the venture and to communicate it coherently to their
partner ABC stakeholders. This occurred during the research process,
specifically through the workshop and interim report. In these we
highlighted the innovations made in Pool, such as creative commons
licenses produced jointly by Creative Commons Australia and the ABC
legal department; and the social media producer role.
ABC stakeholders comprise ABC managers, who allocate budget and
resources to the site and who have a vested interest in the knowledge
that is produced through Pool. They also include radio producers who
participate as ‘callout coordinators’ acting as social media producers
for co-productions, which they develop between their radio programs
and Pool.
External stakeholders include educators and researchers who use
Pool within their own domains, such as university courses and archival
research projects. This group, because of its diversity, did not express
one essential aim. Instead it held the potential to explore the learning

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 potential of Pool as educators gained experience in social media and
education in the public space.
The Pool community is comprised of the group of people
who participate directly on the site by uploading media, holding
discussions, commenting on each other’s works and joining in callouts
and other projects. They range across regular, active users through
to occasional users. For example, some people join Pool as part of
their media course at University, others join to contribute to a callout
by one of the radio producers. Still others come onto the site for a
specific collaboration with his or her contacts. The expressions of
this group varied widely and took the most work to establish common
motivations and behaviours. This group was central to the design
response. As stated earlier, our ambition was to design the site to
enhance the experience of existing users on the site.
A common aim of all the project stakeholders was to optimise the
learning potential that could be gained from the Pool research. ABC
management could learn how to deal with an ‘insurgent’ audience
and the issues of risk to editorial policy and production processes.
The callout coordinators learnt how social media could enhance their
conventional radio presence and the implications for their workload
and professional practice. External educators and researchers were
keen to have a site that had the capacity to perform well in situations
that required some level of certainty. For example, an educator with
a duty of care for his or her students requires a robust site with clear
privacy and intellectual property procedures and a welcoming and
interactive community.

ACTIVE LISTENING THROUGH INTERACTION

The dissonant voices needed to be bought together into patterns so we

could see where ideas were clustered together, and where surprises had
occurred. To achieve this, we adopted a process of listening through

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interaction., This entailed posing questions to those involved and
eliciting responses, by employing interactive devices such as visual and
tactile artefacts. We paid close attention to the responses, which we
posted on the ‘wall’ (Fig. 4).
The collected conversations started to form into an artefact, which
was physically represented by the wall. This ‘artefact’ could then be
approached from different points of view. We would listen to the
backtalk that Schön (1991: 78) describes. That is, the materials on the
wall suggested some directions to follow. This occurred particularly
when we saw the connections between like motivations and
behaviours.
By moving material around on the wall we could see alternative
connections between ideas, start to cluster together. These in turn,
suggested a range of design solutions. This fluid, visual approach
allowed ideas to emerge and be tested against a set of guiding
principles as well as the evidence in front of us. We could look at what
was coming through from the stakeholders, for example, and then
overlay that with the motivations of the community members.
One issue that came to the surface was the presence of the ABC in the
Pool space. Some of the ABC staff were uncertain about how obvious
the ABC professional should be. However, to counter that view we found
that many community members were often motivated to be a part of Pool
because of its proximity to the ABC. They noted that the values espoused
by the ABC were consistent with the Pool community ethos.
As the national public broadcaster, the ABC sets out to represent
many voices and is moving away from an authoritative position
towards one where public contributions become valued. The ABC’s
own ‘brand values’ are Editorial Excellence, Innovation and Creativity,
Universal Access, and Courage. Our finding was that the ABC presence
was something to highlight rather than play down.
The research team felt that the ABC staff presence should be used

CO-CREATIVE PUBLICS AND PUBLICATION DESIGN PRACTICE 155

 to stand for the organisation. This was achieved by attaching the ABC
lissijous: (affectionately known as the ‘worm’) to staff when they
made a comment or initiated a project. In other words, the ABC is
represented by the qualities of the ABC professional media-makers
who were actively interacting with the Pool community. This in turn
drew us to the notion that each person on the site, ABC professionals
included, could be considered as part of the information architecture.
The people who populate the site and who are prepared to share their
‘local knowledge’ can make a website comprehensible, in the same way
that coherent information architecture does.
Members of the Pool community could be used as guides and let
others know how the site worked, thereby increasing movement
through the site by newcomers. This is similar to the way one would
ask directions to a location in a physical space, or for advice on how to
use a tool. In addition, the active community member would be able
to stimulate activity among members by being promoted to the role of
social media producer. We proposed that active members be invited to
perform this role to formalize their position as a guide and contact on
the site.
Another issue we noticed was that the ABC stakeholders saw Pool as
an Arts site: experimental, notional and erratic. The arts label seemed
to denote the site as a place to house otherwise hard-to-categorise
ventures.
However, the Pool members tended to view themselves as media
makers, albeit with a storytelling emphasis. The Pool team also felt
that media better represented the content that was emerging on the
site and therefore, the term media became important to way the site
expressed itself.

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TENSIONS

Some of the most difficult and dissonant conversations were those

between our research team and the Pool team. At times the Pool team felt
that we were missing crucial information and ignoring their suggestions.
They had been working with the beta site and critically assessing what
worked and what didn’t, and had built a comprehensive list of what they
considered to be desirable enhancements to the future site.
However, we stated at the outset that our objective was to represent all
views and consolidate the operations of the site with particular reference
to the current user community. Implicit in this is the imperative to stay
objective and follow what the research was uncovering. This meant, for
example, that we did not recommend new features, however desirable
they might seem, unless we found evidence that the existing members
required them to satisfy their onsite behaviours.
This locates a particular tension to do with emergence. Pool had,
as one of its founding tenets, a desire to let the actual activities of the
community direct the shape of the site over time, rather than impose a
shape on it.
We found that in some cases the Pool team suggestions reflected
user activity, while in other cases they did not. We did not set out to
reconcile this tension; rather we put it forward for discussions and into
the design proposal.
This conflict represents the larger tension of emergence namely that
when design is focused away from the client and towards the audience,
it will produce a different outcome. This point encapsulates my notion
that those who participate in a design conversation will influence the
design artefact that results from the conversation.
The dissonant voices that we had been listening to were providing
information for the design response. They also acted as a motivating
force to move the project forward. Dissonance has a disturbing quality
that seeks consonance to resolve the disturbance.

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 While it is not possible to fully resolve a design outcome, as design
is iterative and generative, dissonance can be seen as an impetus
towards a conclusion.

DIALOGIC RELATIONS BETWEEN LIKE SITUATIONS

In this discussion I use dialogic in the way that Bakhtin does, to show
how one creative work determines how we read another:

… the dialogue extends in both directions, and the previous work of

literature is as altered by the dialogue as the present one is (Bakhtin
1981).

Seeing Pool in terms of other works of social media represents

the dialogic here. To make the site legible we looked at social media
as a genre. This puts Pool in dialogue with other social media sites,
especially those sites that are doing something similar in terms of the
media and the community that surrounds it.
The research team concluded however, that there is no one site that
does exactly what Pool sets out to do, and replicates its situation. We
therefore looked at sites that performed aspects of the Pool venture,
and then for other situations that might be similar.
A site like Vimeo ([Link] for instance, represents the
social media functions of Pool. Vimeo notes its aim as ‘video sharing for
you’. It is focused on a specific outcome in a way that Pool is not. It has a
professional focus, supported by a critical, but supportive, community of
people producing and displaying video works.
Whereas Pool has an open brief, accepts multiple media forms and
is concerned more with storytelling than the resolution of the media,
Vimeo provides an example of a site that defines itself clearly through
its structure and content, reinforced by a set of community guidelines.
For example, it states:

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 We insist that while you are on Vimeo you respect the people you
encounter and their videos. You are free to disagree, but you are not
free to attack people simply for your amusement, and
The more you interact with the community, the more interest in your
work there will be. Get involved and you will enjoy the rewarding
experience that Vimeo can provide ([Link]
accessed 06/10/10).

The tone of voice is established as welcoming, but definite, with

a view to protecting its community values. This site demonstrates
a clear orientation towards expert amateurs as well as professional
membership. People discuss technologies, techniques and issues
relevant to making videos on Vimeo.
The site depicts the growing diversity opening up in social media.
Pool can learn from the Vimeo experience on how to work with its
members to enhance the quality of what is displayed on the site.
Looking at sites like Vimeo we saw that developing a legible
presence for Pool became a writing exercise as much as it was a
design process. That is, the language used and structure of the site
as a text was a significant consideration to develop a solution to the
commission to make the site legible. If the new site design works it
should also influence how people then view other social media.
While there is a degree of the dialogic relationship between Pool
and a site such as Vimeo, it does not fully explain the concept of the
dialogic that I intend here. Pool and Vimeo share a technical and
structural dialogue around how to present themselves. However, more
valuable for this study is the dialogue about issues of hybridity and
transformation.
Pool represents the hybrid space that sits between conventional media
and social media. It is a new space and not directly replicated in other
sites that we came across. The dialogue then is not necessarily with

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 another website, but could occur, with other cultural institutions, such
as museums or galleries that are responding to similar conditions.
The emergence of new roles in Pool can be used to understand
those in the cultuaral institution and vice versa. The dialogic disrupts
currently held perceptions, forcing us to see each of these situations
from another point of view. The ABC, for example, shifts its own
perception of its place in media from the authoritative voice, to being
the voice of the people.

AUDIENCE AS PUBLICS AND NETWORKED PUBLICS

Pool has a small, but apparently active community, indicated by the

strong response we had to our request for participation in the research.
Our initial design objective was to improve the experience of Pool for
the existing members (users).
The research team was able to ascertain the motivations and
online behaviours of what we felt was a representative sample of the
community, through the data collection phase.
Having gained a picture of the Pool community, we could then
consider the people who did not identify as members of this
community. These are people who are nevertheless participating by
viewing the site and potentially engaging in conversations about it on
and off line.
In the design proposal we aimed to satisfy what is known as a ‘sit
forward’ experience, or interacting experience on Pool, which would
suit the community. We can assume, however, that a larger public for
Pool will be people who want a ‘sit back’ experience, similar to the one
conventional media offers. In fact it is likely, as media researcher Kate
Crawford suggests, that this larger group moves between interaction
and listening (Crawford 2009), that is, of both ‘sit forward’ and ‘sit
back’ experiences.

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LINK FROM POOL TO ENGAGED PUBLICATION DESIGN

As the research evolved I realised that by being able to define this less
distinct group of non-traceable listeners or participants I would have
the key to understanding the type of audience that I am concerned with
in this study. Consequently, I turned to the work of Michael Warner
(2002) and Dimitra Milioni (2009) on publics and networked publics to
develop the definition. Considering publics in the context of the Pool
project helped me to conceptualise this audience. I will return to this in
regard to the entire PhD in the conclusion of this text.
While a community strives to know its members and form a sense of
commonality, a public does not. It remains a set of people who do not
connect directly to each other, but are linked through what they pay attention
to, or what they are addressed by. For example, a person who views Pool but
who is not a member of the Pool community forms a public around Pool.
They may make some contribution, or could leave without a trace of their
visit. We are left to speculate who they are and why they visited.
This speculation raises an interesting question around Pool,
namely how do we design for this group? Online technologies provide
numerical and geographic information about them. But we do not
know what their experience has been.
The readership of a book is calculated by the sum of the sales, plus
the library loans, with an assumption around the number of people
who borrowed the book to read. The only way to gauge the experience
(good or bad) is by making a supposition based on these figures
combined with the reviews of the book and public comments. The
same applies to Pool.
We can suppose that many visitors come via an announcement
or review on associated radio programs; via the use of Pool as an
educational or research space; or a broader notice made in the general
media. From this information we can determine some demographic
descriptions. We can also imagine that this public is connected

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 through Pool and other artefacts, forming the networked public that
Milloni describes. But a full picture remains elusive.
In the future better ways may be found to trace the experience of
people who participate as a public rather than as a community. These
ways could include the type of conversational strategies and probes
that I put forward in this exegesis: interactive online workshops
around a theme; the use of visual and audio artefacts to stimulate
discussion; and a cyclical process where ideas are seen to grow as they
are tended by a variety of people.
In this way, as a public becomes familiar with social media it
also becomes prepared to engage with it. Not through the currently
prescribed method of joining a community, but by participating in
the conversation, while retaining the sense of independence that a
public affords.
This concept of ‘a public’, the type I found in Pool, helps to shape my
ideas around the relationship between a publication designer and his or
her audience. It is a group who is more distant than a community but
shares some of the motivation towards engaging with a publication.

THE DESIGNER IN CO-CREATIVE SITUATION

As an outcome of undertaking this research I identified twoways in

which a designer can perform in a co-creative relationship; both are to
do with engaging a public. The first is where the designer creates the
space for stories to emerge. I think of this as a spatial designer role:
designing the space for interaction, as we did for Pool.
The second is where the designer engages fully in what I call
discursive co-reative publication. In this situation a designer works eith
a co-creative public at the discourse level of a design project: framing the
discourse, stimulating, editing and re-presenting it in various forms and

162 CO-CREATIVE PUBLICS AND PUBLICATION DESIGN PRACTICE

connecting one instance of the discourse to other instances. Artefacts
are produced in the course of the discourse to prompt discussion,
interrogate the issue, and as documentation of the discussion.
I address these two instances of the designer in a co-creative
situation in greater depth in the Conclusion under Co-creative publication
design practice.

CO-CREATIVE PUBLICS AND PUBLICATION DESIGN PRACTICE 163

 CONCLUSION

164 CO-CREATIVE PUBLICS AND PUBLICATION DESIGN PRACTICE

RESOLVING THE RESEARCH QUESTIONS

Through a critique of practices from the past, and new ones

for the future, this study has explored the relationship between
a publication designer and their audience. I have argued that
both designer and audience are reciprocally changing their
behaviour as a result of the development of participatory,
specifically co-creative, design and communication contexts.
As a consequence of the change in this relationship, the
practice of publication design is itself transforming.

I substantiate the claim I make by drawing a connection between the

practices and behaviours evident in the print and publishing collectives
in Backyard Press and Champion Books (Case Study 2) with the practices
and behaviours in ABC Pool (Case Study 3). Both of these case studies
depict collaborative publication situations, which share similarities and,
as highlighted through the critique, have important differences.
In the following synthesis of the various discoveries and insights
gleaned throughout this doctoral study, I develop the core argument
and consider the implications for design practitioners.
The research questions outlined in the Introduction to this text
framed the investigation. I now resolve these questions, based on the
practice-based research I have conducted in this study.

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 In the first research question—What is the place of the designer in an
altered relationship between a public and design—I explored the impact of a
change in the relationship between a designer and their audience on
the practice of design and the consequent effect on the designer.
In the second—How can a public become conversant with the language of
design (the design conversation)—I considered the same situation from the
audience perspective.
In this concluding chapter, I use the key discoveries I came to in
each of the research projects to frame the argument that I make. The
first stage of the research is represented below by the section on The
design conversation; and the second stage represented by Co-creative
situations.
Finally, through specific reference to the Projects Space that was
designed for the Pool site, I reveal the co-creative nature of the design
process and realization of the site. I use this example to exemplify one
way that a professional publication designer can engage in co-creative
publication design. I then extend the concept of a co-creative design
to describe a discursive co-creative practice, performed in the public
domain.
In doing so I resolve the research questions.

166 CO-CREATIVE PUBLICS AND PUBLICATION DESIGN PRACTICE

FRAMING THE ARGUMENT

I have framed this investigation through the lens of the ‘design

conversation’. This is a conversation which represents the internal
focus of the design process. I have also used the term ‘co-creative
situations’ to represent an external orientation and the designer’s place
in relationship to the audience. It is from these two views as discussed
in Chapter 2, that I form and restate the argument and propose two
scenarios to describe the potential practice of the publication designer.

THE DESIGN CONVERSATION

The Design Audio Cloud project was an opportunity to sketch out what
I came to term the ‘design conversation’. In the study I use the term
to encapsulate the multiple conversations that facilitate the design
making process, from inception through to completion of the artefact.
The Design Audio Cloud was a simulation of conversations within
the design process. The simulated conversations were recorded and
designed as a sound publication that was played in a public context
(the gallery).
In this project, the design conversation manifests as a sound artefact.
By taking the abstract concept of a conversation into a material form I
was able to conceptualise and understand the notion of a conversation
more readily. I realised that as a designer I needed to objectify the
conversation, in the same way that I might turn text and image into an
object such as a publication. This is a form of knowing through design,
or what Henrik Gedenryd (1998) calls ‘interaction cognition’.
Once I had the shape of the design conversation I could then
deconstruct it into its component characteristics and view how each

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 of these fit together, and the relationships between them. I was
specifically looking for the rudiments of communication that flow
through the design process; into the design artefact; and potentially
through to the audience.
I concluded that the conversation that occurs in the practice of
publication design is essentially a cyclical process of inquiry and
listening, which is facilitated through artefacts or inquiring materials
and process points. This conversation is multi-vocal and driven by
the dissonance of multiple stakeholder voices, which propels the
conversation to a resolution in the form of an artefact.
Each instance of the conversation is connected to other instances
via a dialogic chain of similar experiences. As a consequence of this
realization, dissonance and dialogic became the central concepts that
I used to describe this specific conversation, which is situated in the
design process.
The design conversation that I defined in the early stage of the
doctoral study became a lens through which I could view the reciprocal
evolution of designer and audience. Through the study, I mapped how
a designer in a co-creative situation could use the design conversation
to enable a public to become conversant with the language of
design. By opening their design conversation to this public, the
designer removes a number of impediments that hinder the flow of
communication between the various parties.
In turn, the participants in a project may bring novel design
solutions to bear. This exchange results in a discursive situation, which
is generated through the vehicle of the design conversation. It is this
discourse between the various entities in a project, that I contend
enables large-scale participation in publication design. I return to this
in the next section in forming the argument.

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CO-CREATIVE SITUATIONS

My reflection on working in a collective print and publishing

environment at Backyard Press and Champion Books allowed me to
connect that experience to contemporary participatory media and
design. In particular, I considered two aspects of the experience
that were relevant to the investigation: the practice of self-managed
autonomy in a collective situation; and audience participation around
publication design.
I compared the similarities between the practice of self-management
within the Backyard Press collective and the type of co-creation that
derives from the Open Source movement. In addition I used the type
of audience engagement that occurred in that situation as a way to
understand the co-creative public I come to describe in this study.
The case study into Pool gave me a behind-the-scenes look at social
and participatory media as co-creative publication forms. The research
was conducted as a designerly investigation through communication
and interaction design methods.
Through the Pool research project I made three discoveries via the
role of the Social Media Producer, which enabled my understanding of
the re-conceptualised role of the publication designer in a co-creative
situation. I identified a specific instance of this role on Pool where
a professional employee (the radio producer) engaged with the co-
creative community to produce broadcast quality outcomes. This led
me to propose that this role was comparable to a publication designer
who works with various publics to create an outcome derived from the
contributions.
As with the conventional designer, the radio producer in this
scenario brings their broadcast practice to the co-creative situation.
This is valued by members of the community who aim to improve
the production values or the quality of storytelling in their work.
Nevertheless, the radio producer adjusts their practice as they engage

CO-CREATIVE PUBLICS AND PUBLICATION DESIGN PRACTICE 169

 with these community participants. They accept, for example, that
the specific ideas were generated by the participant and remain their
property, or that the final decisions on the form of the work lies with
the participant, regardless of the level of collaboration entered into.
The second discovery involved the identification of the nature of the
co-creative space that Pool occupied. The process of inquiry that was
used by the research team (employing interaction and communication
design strategies) led to an understanding of the type of co-creative
public in the Pool environment.
The Pool project reinforced my emerging realisation that in order
to design co-creative publication spaces and experiences effectively, a
designer is required to understand how participation and co-creation
work. This can be achieved by employing similar inquiry methods.
However I argue that it is also necessary to experience working
collaboratively in order to fully know the experience. I used my own
working knowledge of collective behaviours in the Backyard Press and
Champion Books collectives to inform the design process in Pool. As
an example, my role in the Backyard Press collective was to manage the
communication between the various production units. As there was
not a hierarchy or chain of command in the process, this role required
representing each unit openly and frankly, and a level of negotiation
to achieve agreement on the production flow. I took a similar role
in the Pool project, where I developed the lines of communication
between the Pool team, our research team, other technical advisors,
the ABC stakeholders and finally the web development team. Each of
these stakeholder groups had their own motivations and behaviours,
which I was required to ‘read’ as a collective, in order to optimize the
communication between them.

170 CO-CREATIVE PUBLICS AND PUBLICATION DESIGN PRACTICE

 Based on the inquiry into Pool and informed by the literature the
third discovery of the project was the formation of a definition of the
audience as a co-creative public, The definition of a co-creative public
draws together two ideas that emerged in the first case studies and
which culminated in the Pool research.
To articulate this emerging social arrangement of people as a co-
creative public, I conflate Michael Warner’s (2002) description of a
public as a self-organised relation of strangers, formed by attention
with the definition of co-creation that emerged out of the Open Source
movement in the early 2000s (Bollier 2008), this is expanded on in the
next section.

CO-CREATIVE PUBLICS AND PUBLICATION DESIGN PRACTICE 171

 FORMING THE ARGUMENT

In forming the argument of the research findings I began by describing

the co-creative design relationship and its constituents: a public
that forms around the design process and artefact; and a design
practitioner who is in the design process. This gave me the context
in which these constituents (audience and designer) interact. I then
address the impact of a co-creative public on the practice of publication
design.

A CO-CREATIVE PUBLIC

A co-creative public, as I describe it, shares several characteristics with

‘a public’ as enumerated by Michael Warner (2002). A public is, in his
words, self-organising, formed from attention and as a relation among
strangers. A public distinguishes itself from the non-specific, general
public in several ways.
Most notably a member of a public engages in some form of direct
interaction with the object that it pays attention to. This applies
whether the object of attention is a person (a designer, for example),
artefact or the conversation surrounding it.
A co-creative public, as I define it in this study, hones the
characteristics of a public (as described by Warner) with the addition of
three distinguishing features of the Open Source co-creator, drawn in
part from David Bollier’s description of co-creation in Viral spiral: how
the commoners built a digital republic of their own (2008):

First, the co-creator is autonomous. They engage according to their

own motivations, not necessarily because of a shared belief

172 CO-CREATIVE PUBLICS AND PUBLICATION DESIGN PRACTICE

 Second, the co-creator is motivated to develop co-creative practices
and literacies

Third, the discourse in a co-creative public is deliberate and an

essential act and artefact of co-creation. The discourse may also be
multi-modal, using visual and other materials as communicative
agents.

If we adopt and apply Stan Anson’s Sequence of Motives (from his

analysis of Backyard Press on P. 102) it becomes possible to establish
the following schema as a means to understand how and why a co-
creative public forms. This rationale is taken from the perspective of
an individual who becomes a member of a public.

The sequence of motives for a co-creative public are:

1. exercise of media in the production of discourse and self-
expression
2. autonomous and self-elected participation in a public (rather than
through a community)
3. formed from paying and receiving attention
4. develop literacies in co-creation and co-creative design

The primary point that I construct here (the exercise of media in the
production of discourse and self-expression) defines the motivation
behind a co-creative public most precisely. Discourse acts as the link
between disparate and autonomous individuals. Without it, even the
loose entity of a public could not exist. Importantly, this point raises
the discourse, or the exchange of ideas, thoughts, opinions or stories
to becoming the principal outcome, rather than a consequence of the
formation of a co-creative public.
Implicit in the notion of a co-creative public is the fact that this
type of public creates something in concert with others. A co-creative

CO-CREATIVE PUBLICS AND PUBLICATION DESIGN PRACTICE 173

 public in the practice of publication design is not an audience that
consumes, but one that makes an artefact whilst engaging at some
level with the experience of the design process; and, as mentioned
above, it is an audience which generates discourse around the artefact
and experience.

THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN THE ARTEFACT AND DISCOURSE

The artefact that is created as a result of the discourse and practices

that are generated by networked, co-creative publics also evolves in the
above scenario. A number of features can be discerned that portray the
change in the artefact.
In conventional publication design there is a distance between
the designer and the audience, which is seldom breached. A print
publication for example does not enable discourse to directly flow back
to the designer, other than the limited form of letter to the editor for
example.
In social media, however, the conversation can be situated within the
artefact, taking the form of comments, or responses (made in various
media), which become embedded in the artefact and extend it beyond a
publication date or program schedule. These embedded conversations
act like the marginalia written in books as extensions of the published
text and grow the artefact depending on the response it attracts.

174 CO-CREATIVE PUBLICS AND PUBLICATION DESIGN PRACTICE

CO-CREATIVE PUBLICATION DESIGN PRACTICE

I now turn to the two scenarios of co-creative publication design practice

that I put forward in this study. The first is the design of co-creative
spaces; the second is discourse-based co-creative publication design.

1. DESIGNING CO-CREATIVE PUBLICATIONS

In this discussion I make use of one part of the Pool redesign project
to demonstrate the first practice of designing co-creative spaces in this
project. During the research phase we found that Pool was a site for co-
creative activities. However on the beta site it was not clear how those
activities took place and who could be involved. The research team
concluded that a specific space be designed into the site to highlight co-
creation activities and the discussions that make co-creation possible.
The new space was titled Projects. It was here that a participant could
initiate or join a project and contribute comments and media objects
(text, audio or vision). Projects was to be where most discussion and
negotiation occurred. The space was designed to comprise a display
area, a comment section and a discussion thread. It also utilized the
cross-site communication facilities designed to allow people to talk
directly with each other.
Projects was constructed as a negotiating space, where participants
collaboratively managed their own interactions, developed guidelines for the
project and produced outcomes. For example, a participant could develop
their work to be broadcast on a radio program, or engage in collaboration
with another participant. Alternatively, they might shape a new project with
others and write a call out to recruit members to the project. When this was
used in the project, discussions were, on the whole, public and comments

CO-CREATIVE PUBLICS AND PUBLICATION DESIGN PRACTICE 175

 tended to be appreciative, encouraging, provide advice on technique or query
the contributor about the work or intention.
To design the site’s architecture it was necessary to map the specific
moves that a person makes in a co-creative activity and to then translate
these human interactions (such as communication or initiative) into a
basic technical function. The function was then implemented on the
site and as a single binary function, it is then linked to other functions,
which when activated caused a chain of events to occur.
The process of converting human behaviour to technical function,
which in turn enables interactive behaviours online, provokes a
designer to consider interactions between people in a mechanical way.
Subsequently the conversion back to a technical function that enables
interaction, permits the designer to consider human interactions such
as communication or collaboration, in a material sense.
Consequently, the practitioner who designs a co-creative space has
both a new set of mechanical as well as material elements to work with.
I contend, that to effectively design with these it is essential to have a
working knowledge of co-creation. I have used this doctoral study to
develop a typology of characteristics that pertain to co-creation. I referred
to my background in the collectives of Backyard Press and Champion
Books to draw on collective practices to substantiate this endeavour.
In the case where a designer creates a publication space for co-
creative activities, the designer (or design team) works with the user
group and stakeholders. The design artefact is the publication space,
which can be either on- or off-line; or it could be a combination of
both. However, as with the Pool research and redesign project, the
publication space may not be the only outcome.
In the Pool project I was alerted to what became a more
compelling outcome for my purposes in this study. I realised that the
communication that occurred in and around this project could be seen
as an artefact of the project.

176 CO-CREATIVE PUBLICS AND PUBLICATION DESIGN PRACTICE

2. DISCURSIVE, CO-CREATIVE PUBLICATION DESIGN

In the previous scenario the designer adjusts their practice to be able to

design a relatively new type of co-creative publication, with a changed
set of materials to work with (such as a knowledge of the behaviours
and motivations that people have in a collaborative engagement).
That scenario is akin to various types of Participatory or Co-Design
approaches, where the designer works closely with the end user, or
alternatively designs with the user in mind.
In this second scenario I put forward a radically different
proposition that repositions the publication designer and the practice.
In this proposition the designer becomes responsible for generating
the discourse within a co-creative public, as well as more broadly in the
public sphere.
This proposition encapsulates the key themes that run though this
study, namely the designer re-orients their practice to interface with a
new type of mainstream audience; the work is public; and publication
design takes place within a co-creative relationship.
The practice for this designer centres on the act of bringing
thoughts, opinions, information and stories into the public discourse.
In addition, this act of publication is done in the public domain.
This practice de-centres the artefact from being the core objective
of the project, notwithstanding the fact that design artefacts are used
in this practice to produce knowledge whilst also being the outcome.
In other words, the designer’s contribution is not categorised by the
medium in which they work, such as a ‘book-designer’ or a ‘web-
designer’, but by the discourse they produce.
It could be argued that this is the manifestation of the shift in
contemporary design education and practice from naming publication
design as a specialization within graphic design to being within the
domain of communication design.
By de-coupling the design artefact from the design practice it is

CO-CREATIVE PUBLICS AND PUBLICATION DESIGN PRACTICE 177

 possible to consider, as I have done in this study, a practice that can
be genuinely identified as communication design. The designer in
this scenario does not design communication, which would imply a
higher level of manipulation of communication than desired. Instead
this designer designs the channels through which communication is
exchanged; curates discourse and works to form and then work within
a co-creative public.
The design practitioner does not cede their professional role. Yet the
role and practice change in several ways. As a curator of a co-creative
public’s discourse, the practitioner becomes responsible for the act of
bringing the discourse into the public realm. This could be in familiar
publication forms such print and web. It might also be through public
debate, criticism or an event.
This role shifts the designer from being a service provider to someone
engaged at a public interface. In this position the designer initiates
as well as responds to a debate. In effect this requires the designer to
design the conditions for a discourse to emerge; the channels through
which communication flows; and the maintenance of the two-way
communication as a component of the publication artefact.

SUMMARY

Throughout the study I have used the design conversation to locate

the communicative imperative within publication design. From there I
proposed opening the design conversation to a co-creative public as a
means to engage the public in a relatively equal relationship.
This development traces a genealogy in communication design,
which can be represented by the same changes in publication design
that I describe in this study. In this shift graphic design, which
emerged from a trade-based activity ensconced in the print industry,
became a profession. This movement was led by practitioners such as
Jan Tschichold (1928) who de-connected the practice of design from

178 CO-CREATIVE PUBLICS AND PUBLICATION DESIGN PRACTICE

the technology and production method. Overtime publication design
developed a parallel place in the academy and repositioned itself as a
discipline as well as a profession.
In the argument put in this study I assert that publication design
now places itself as an interlocutor in the discourse that occurs in the
public sphere. The argument is used to represent the shift in practice
from graphic design to communication design. It alludes as well to an
evolution in communication design towards a co-creative practice.

CO-CREATIVE PUBLICS AND PUBLICATION DESIGN PRACTICE 179

 THE TRANSFORMATION OF MY PUBLICATION
DESIGN PRACTICE

In this section I review the transformation of my own practice as a

way to demonstrate the shift from conventional graphic and print-
based publication design practice to discourse-based, co-creative,
publication design.
I noted that by studying the design conversation I became aware of
the way communication works in contemporary publication design.
As the study progressed I became conscious that the way I now design
is situated in conversations with others, utilizing artefacts within the
conversation.
In reflecting on my own practice I could trace a path from my
experience working in a collective situation through to my current
practice as a design educator, researcher and practitioner. I became
aware that the way I collaborate became co-creative (as described here)
with the people I work with.
As this study progressed I thought about the change in how
I collaborate in terms of how I communicate through design. I
concluded that I was relating differently to both the artefact (a
publication) as well as the audience. Initially, despite producing work
collectively I was nevertheless working in a conventional way, making
statements to the audience. These design works may have been
appealing and well targeted. The works were intentionally designed to
‘talk’ in a visual language that suited the expectations of the audience
(which in many cases I knew well). However the audience was largely a
subject of the communication rather than an interlocutor. The graphic

180 CO-CREATIVE PUBLICS AND PUBLICATION DESIGN PRACTICE

design tradition I was working in had developed to speak to, rather
than with, the audience.
As a design educator I became critical of the concentration on the
artefact in design to the detriment of its communicative qualities. The
quality of the finish of te work superceded the primary task, as I saw it,
of engaging in a dialogue with others.
I was attracted by the intention in emerging fields such as
interaction design, user-centred and participatory design to re-
focus the attention away from the artefact and towards the end-user.
However, my own interest remained in communication design as it
privileges a co-created agreement on meaning. In other words, that an
audience member could become involved in the discourse.
This set up a challenge for me personally as well as professionally.
I needed to transform my own communication and design process,
as well as articulate how I proposed to alter these processes. It is this
challenge that drove the doctoral study and its inquiry.
The first stage of this study concentrated on the nature of
communication, which I framed as the design conversation. It was
internally focused onto the design process, yet was intended to provide
a way of seeing clearly the challenge of communicating effectively.
From this I developed a sense of what a conversation was and
proceeded to deconstruct the conversation in order to find what I
considered its key features. I arrived at dissonance and dialogic as
features that defined a design conversation. This gave me the motivating
force (dissonance and how it strives for resolution) and a linking
mechanism (the dialogic), which creates a network of discourse.
In the second stage of the study I orientated my attention towards
what I came to know as a public. The definition of a co-creative public
that I arrived at resolved two problems in the inquiry. Firstly it gave
definition to a new type of autonomous yet engaged audience, and

CO-CREATIVE PUBLICS AND PUBLICATION DESIGN PRACTICE 181

 secondly it allowed me to envisage the concept of publication design as
a public discourse.
By defining publication design as a discourse I am now able to
appreciate my own activities as a collaborator and communicator
differently. Central to collaboration and communication are the intent
to negotiate an agreement to work together and to communicate on
agreed terms.
However, this study has convinced me that such an agreement
is more effectively formed where all parties are accorded their own
position. Hence the emphasis that is given in this study to autonomy
and self-organised relationships, such as a public and in particular a
co-creative public.
Therefore I now consider the publication design process as
one where equitable participants engage in a negotiation to co-
create meaning through communication. The agreement sought,
is, as Ranulph Glanville (1996) proposes, to strive for a common
understanding, yet to accept misunderstanding as a positive outcome.
My practice now reflects that position, namely that seeking
agreement includes its own contradiction (misunderstanding), and
that this is a benefit. I am conscious of foregoing the conventional
authority vested in a design professional in order to obtain this benefit.
Nevertheless, ceding authority does not imply ceding influence or
expertise in the process. As I have shown in the description of the
social media producer in the Pool research, a professional is valued in a
co-creative public for these qualities.
Further I am now aware that my practice of publication design is
to produce public discourse. This does not imply that all discourse
is conducted in the general public. Rather that this type of discourse
includes creating the conditions for a public to form and to actively
engage in the discourse.

182 CO-CREATIVE PUBLICS AND PUBLICATION DESIGN PRACTICE

 A public, as proposed here is dynamic and evolving. It enhances
its literacies as it engages, and in turn, creates new expectations
of the experience in which it engages. The discourse it produces is
the ultimate publication artefact, regardless of what was created to
generate that discourse.
By coming to this realisation in my own practice, I have been able to
transition from a conventional graphic design approach, which I found
limited the potential for discourse, towards a communication design
approach, as described in this study. This practice is co-creative,
generative and based in discourse.
I noticed the change in my own practice most clearly in design
education, where I engage in conversation around the artefact and
what it aims to communicate, rather than how it looks or how well it is
finished. I also see the transformation in how I conduct participatory
research projects, again largely based in discursive explorations.
As I conclude this doctoral study I continue to actively investigate
participation, collaboration, co-creation and discourse. These activities
inform all my current research projects in some way.

CO-CREATIVE PUBLICS AND PUBLICATION DESIGN PRACTICE 183

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