About

Our Collaborative Tools is both an online design research publication, a participatory archive and a pedagogical tool. It is firstly a catalogue of collective artistic projects involving digital tools, that are situated responses rather than generic solutions.

All the projects listed in this catalogue contribute to the building of commons, through digital artistic devices. The artists and designers who implement them are – all in their own way – shaping frameworks to host collaborations (with peers, experts from other disciplines, a classroom, inhabitants of a territory, other than humans, etc.). We are mostly interested in the ambivalent status of those productions that are both artworks and tools.

However, we do not only aim to archive projects but also to document collective practices and study how artists and designers use, combine, fork, existing tools and develop new ones, so they can fit to their working methods and not the way around. For this purpose, a collection of articles and a mediagraphy adds a critical perspective on the subject of digital collaboration and the – always collective at some point – making of situated tools for artistic purposes.

The platform

This platform aims to be used by designers and artists – students or professionals – who work on notions such as collaboration, cooperation, contribution, participation, creative process, free software (FOSS), computer development and visual arts.

Ourcollaborative.tools is designed to create a maximum of relationships between the different objects it is constituted of. The general idea is to offer as much variations as possible to explore the content so feel free to shuffle the data and follow your own path.

For now, we are feeding the platform with a selection of projects, articles, notions and ressources of our own curation and with the proposals of a narrow circle of artists, designers and academics from our network. However, ourcollaborative.tools has been thought as a participative archive and will soon be opened to proposals. More symbolically, its role is also to engage a community of creators motivated by the idea of ​​creative collaboration. We are continuously working on its design and editorial structure and we will continue for some time.

Who ?

Graphic design: Benjamin Dumond

Web development: Jérémie Nuel

Editorial coordination and conception: Jérémie Nuel and Cléa Di Fabio

Proofreading and translation: Ayris Taban

Typefaces : Petit Frère et Ready Active from Plain Form

Thanks to: David-Olivier Lartigaud, Damien Baïs, Inge Eller, Maria Moreira, Sarah Garcin, An Mertens and ESAC Cambrai for the workshop we conducted there during the OpenOpen event.

To contact us, you can send an email at : randomlab(at)esadse.fr

Partners

This platform has been made by the Random(Lab) of ESADSE within the context of a European project called Digital Tools for Creative Collaboration. DTCC has been led by ESADSE with EKA, HfG and BEDA as partners from June 2021 to June 2023. It is co-funded by the Erasmus+ program of the European Commission.