This blog is part diary, part portfolio. Often, the project's final products are not published yet – I hope you enjoy the process and the journey through the projects!
The journal is not currently translated, posts appear in the language that makes the most sense in context.
Der Verein kontexte., für den ich ehrenamtlich tätig bin, hat vor kurzem seinen Namen geändert. Der Verein heißt jetzt: kontexte. Netzwerk zur Förderung von Kultur- und Sozialwissenschaftlerinnen.
Die Sozialwissenschaften wurden zusätzlich in den Namen aufgenommen, weil das Netzwerk seit seiner Entstehung mehr in diese Richtung gewachsen ist. Außerdem ist mittlerweile ein guter Teil des Vereinsvorstandes (inklusive mir) nicht mehr rein in den Kulturwissenschaften anzusiedeln.
Um die Namensänderung offiziell zu machen, habe ich nicht nur das Logo aktualisiert, sondern auch eine kleine Animation erstellt.
Today I want to document a design project that is also a proof of concept. It combines a few ideas I’ve been curious to try out, and they all came together for this little project.
Initially, I was asked to design a logo for an academic conference in the summer of 2021. This conference was completely online due to travel restrictions and safety concerns, but the team was trying to make the event feel more “real”.
For the last few months, I have been working on a bunch of projects that cannot be published or shown yet, and it’s probably going to stay like that for a while longer.
Given the circumstances, this project is quite chaotic at the moment, but the screenshot below seems fitting.
As mentioned previously, we held a workshop at a hacker summer camp in Germany earlier this year. Several participants have asked for the transcripts of the responses we collected, so I have typed them up for you here.
The camp site, but in 2015.
I’m really happy we got the chance to do this at an outdoor camping event since some of the potential issues that came up repeatedly have never been mentioned while engaging in similar exercises in the standard indoor setting of a conference.
Today I finished typing out the responses Victoria Neumann and I collected during our workshops at the Chaos Communication Camp 2019.
The workshops were part of our SocialTech project. This one specifically was tailored for an open-air tech event: “Accessibility and Inclusion – Hacking everyday communication practices to change the world.”
Among other things, we were reflecting about our own access needs and potential responses to them. It was particularly interesting to do this at a week-long camping event since a lot of needs (and also opportunities) are heavily depending on the context they are happening in. Since conference-type events are usually held indoors, the contrast between the usual conference space and an open field in late August was striking. Together we identified and discussed both event-specific and more universal questions surrounding the topics of accessibility and inclusion.
The one thing everyone agrees on: everything can be hacked.
I’m confident to say everyone went home with many new ideas to think about. A handful of participants even left the workshop together. In response to one of the most frequently mentioned access issues, they decided to try and write an app for the camp’s card10 badge. I’m really curious to see where that goes!
