People were invited to draw one letter and append it to a dashboard we built for the workshop, slowly versioning the characters of "Draw-it-with-others". It followed the DIWO activity every morning. It functioned as a tool, an installation, a workshop... creating space for multiple ways to activate a process. 4
Draw-it-with-others (DIWO) explores drawing as a free and open source practice. By using drawing as an entry point to think about authorship, circulation, collective work and situated tools, DIWO research how technology organizes togetherness, and how togetherness affects technology.
In line with its departure point 'Do-It-With-Others', DIWO treasures the idea that we are interconnected and there is always others being involved. Here, we would like to suggest DIWO as a verb. To DIWO, is to acknowledge these others: “them” being in the software, in the materials, together in the studio with you, or connected from another part of the world. 1
For the H&D Summer Camp, we, the DIWO Working Group, prepared a series of small morning activities with some breakfast and drawing materials. Participants were invited to stretch their body-mind through a series of drawing prompts (while having coffee!).
Over the course of 10 days of camp, these appointments became part of the routine: waking up, brushing teeth, going for breakfast, receiving a drawing prompt. Thanks to its simple format 2 we were able to support different forms of engagement and participation. Sometimes it would take place in a small group at a tiny table or some other times more than 30 people with a live projection.
Every activity was proposed with a "Drawing Prompt of the Day", printed on the fly with a receipt printer. (Kindly borrowed from Manetta Berends! Mega thank you!) Each prompt came with a title, cute illustration, description, some steps to activate it, and references or a backstory on how the activity sparked our interest. 3
All the activities brought us many memories and insights. Here's a list of prompts and things we learned along the way:
Screenshots are an interesting image format, rich with intimate narratives. We proposed to participants to trace the display of their smartphone. We also suggested to exchange their phone with someone else, to stay with the vulnerability of sharing such personal device with others.
Before the summer camp, H&D facilitated a peer review process for the program. We reached out to Adèle Gregoire that was planning to work with their pen-plotter 5 . Inspired by their activity and intercepting a general interest in LARP practices at the camp (Chatty-LARP 6 Pi-rats Mythologum 7 ), we invited groups of two people to transform into plotters. In this way, people get an insight of a complex tool by taking on the perspective of the tool itself. It is a way to let them familiarize with a machine before diving into its technicalities.
SVG-re-draw was the first custom software we proposed at the camp 8 . People could scan a QR code on the prompt, that linked to a SVG drawing by someone. They could reposition the strokes, moving and rotating them to compose another figure, then send it to someone else for another re-draw. Through this tool, we were interested in how authorship would blur when multiple users/creators are involved. We primpted the prompt, people connected to the website, spent some time re-drawing and hit send.
...and it didn't work.
Developing web-app is always a pain, because each browser behaves differently. What Chromium likes, Firefox doesn't. Then comes Safari, which does everything in its own way. To complicate things even more, we were targeting mobile browsers. When we finally managed to support all of these, the server crashed. It was disheartening. It was a tool meeting users for the first time, and that rarely goes as planned.
Looking back, we realized that 'the tool not working' could have been a moment to treasure: an interruption to the logic of software-as-product that creative clown industries have made us used to. A moment for others to participate instead: to share joy and mourn together errors in production. Debugging as a collective ritual? Sounds nice. (We still have unresolved feeling about this prompt, at least Chae does.)
During the radio show we tried another small piece of software: drw 9 , a websocket server to receive drawings from connected users. Gathering to recall the events of the day turned out to be the best setting for such activity. Funny feedback loops happened between what was being said/broadcasted and what was being drawn.
People (in the radio barn and from elsewhere!) were sending drawing, these with the help of Karl were received on the H&D homepage and the Diwoboat (our server) was storing all for future re-use 10 . Kamo was animating them in real-time and projecting them on the barn of the radio booth. A small ecosystem of situated software: not a single centralized program, but rather a network of different pieces interacting in their own ways.
Connect the dots!
Digital tool that extracts points from SVGs and creates space to (re)connect the dotsWe tried to re-use the drawings sent during the radioshow with yet another DIWO tool: a connect-the-dots puzzle generator. To our immense joy we managed to plug the pieces together, as well with our Markdown-to-receipt renderer. This was one of the moments when we felt that the previous three months of work paid off. It felt like tending to a small garden, and it inspired us to keep working with the idea of open endings, and interdependencies of tools. (The source drawings were carefully selected for each H&D participants and given as a goodbye gift.)
For a more documentation about the prompts please check our repository! 11
A final note about the DIWO Working Group: Chae and Kamo are using this name, but feel mega free to reach out, fork the software, add prompts, prototype tools, share references, and more! Let’s draw together…!