To publish is to make known; to make aware; to make public. It is to form ‘publics’ too, as Michael Warner (via Paul Soulellis) notes.

To publish is to wake the world up to something—it’s to distribute; to disperse; to share, as Tereza Bettinardi noted in a recent presentation, “Publishing is a form of Shared Enthusiasm”. 

This makes publishing and Communication Design obvious allies. But how does this symbiotic relationship manifest? This studio aims to find out by combining messy and surprising reading, writing, research techniques with publishable outcomes produced session-by-session.

This studio engages with expected and unexpected (experimental) forms of researching and responding (through types of reading and writing) to theoretical, practice-centred forms of knowledge sharing.

You will develop a variety of ways of thinking about what archiving and making ‘public/s’ means by affecting existing material and utilising ‘gestures of publishing’ such as posting, performing, swarming, recording, editing, bootlegging, dreaming, copy-pasting, sabotaging and more… 

— Students will explore publishing as an area of autonomous and collaborative activity within expanded definitions of practice.
— Students will learn, hands-on, how archives operate and the role of the designer within these and similar structures.
— Students will develop key skills that not only enrich appreciation of research material but also provide prompts, techniques and ‘tricks’ that will aid them in future project work.

Each week you will explore a diverse range of texts, books, producers, projects, emergent formats and concepts in order to produce a publishable piece of material based on explorations per session—rapidly building a portfolio over the course of the programme. You will engage with publishing by sifting through independent libraries and visits to archives as well as creating libraries and archives of your own. Sleeping archives—Awake!

There are 3 assignment tasks for this studio, the briefs are made up of a range of milestone deliverables that are interconnected and build upon each other.

Brief 1: Archival Exchange
The first brief focuses on archives and encourages students to—first research—then intervene/respond to an identified archive or collection.

Brief 2: Talking About 
The second brief is a group task focusing on interview & conversation as research tools as well as providing insight into the collaborative nature of publishing houses.

Brief 3: SKO
The third brief asks students to create a publishable collection (or archive) out of the various works made over the course of the studio, framed as a personal reflection on Publishing as Practice.

On practice:
Designer as Author by Michael Rock

On Publishing:
UrgentCraft 1.0 by Paul Soulellis

On Archives:
Tasks of the Contingent Librarian by Simon Browne

A complete reference list will be built up session by session.

— Melbourne Art Library
— Women’s Art Register (WAR)
— RMIT Design Archive