Conference

As a teacher of a media design course in an art school (Experimental Publishing, or XPUB in Rotterdam), we teach and use with our students a mix of free software tools and paradigms: the commandline/BASH, python, javascript, paged.js, alongside teaching self-hosting and server maintenance. For us, a tool like ImageMagick, though arguably complex and idiosyncratic embodies many important pedagogic values that are for instance missing in the popular environment Processing, which positions itself as an integrated "programming language, development environment, and teaching methodology", designed for and by artists and designers.

In this talk, we propose an approach to design pedagogy with free software that rejects the false neutrality of seamless design solutions, instead embracing seamfulness, situated within the contingencies of existing systems, working with technology as boundary objects as a means of bridging diverse communities of practice. This talk will be an expansion of an earlier essay which is available online at: Torn_at_the_seams:_vernacular_approaches_to_teaching_with_computational_tools