Entering into the patchwork

ﾟ･:･｡ Excerpts from our thinking and thoughts:

Health, Care and Technology as I follow them are not so separate, nor are the ways we work and think through a holistic practice with Hackers & Designers. We always start our meetings with how we are, discussing with each other how our bodyminds meet our work shapes what we feel we can do, how we can do it and what emerges from there. Without this sense of care and collectivity with attention to our bodies. None of the work we do would be possible.

The patchwork resembles a charming and imperfect mesh of experiences of working together as H&D, including the tools and servers we build and use. Over the years, H&D developed a peculiar social and technical praxis – an experimental space for technical exploration and collaboration. This space is informed by mindful constrain regarding time, material and financial resources, as well as constraints regarding health and know-how. Such constraints are neither barriers to be overcome, nor something to celebrate or fetishize all too easily.

This is a community technology, just like Corbett O’Toole speaks about hot showers and shared food is a community technology that too is asking how you are and giving the time and space to respond. That too is learning together about our tools that might not reproduce the same futures that we are implicated into.

Hi dears, been thinking about what stories our tools tell, and how to re-tell, how to re-spond? When we invite into the patchwork, offering hot showers and snacks. (E-ink displays and ESP snacks – so yummy!) ….. build relationships with technology that recognise it as never neutral or singular, but shaped through shared practice, stuff we build together.

Practicing in the midst of collective conditions, means having to learn how to lean into other, sometimes divergent, temporalities, and expectations of what can and should be achieved.

ﾟ･:･｡ code excerpt from “Connecting through seams,” first commissioned by Nieuwe Instituut for the exhibition Dutch, More or Less that was on view from September 2025 to February 2026:

let topics = [
    [
        "AI: Ancestral Intelligence", 
        "This network is braided from many hands and voices—like protest banners stretched across time, carrying echoes of strikes, struggles, and shared invention. Nothing is made alone; every code, every circuit, every gesture builds on what came before. By joining, you tap into collective technical intuition, an ongoing chorus of past, present, and future."],   
    [
        "(Re) Sourcing Otherwise", 
        "Inside every network are hidden hands — maintainers, open-source communities, cables, circuits, and the raw materials that keep signals moving. Nothing begins from scratch; each layer is unpicked and rewoven from others' work. To “source otherwise” is to infiltrate and unmake binaries, to reimagine what “sharing” means when we share responsibility for the tools we inherit."],   
    [
        "Staying in Touch", 
        "Some things can't be organised by sending a million emails. Some things live instead in the gestures of many hands—picking up where another left off, leaning in, trusting, staying connected. Collaboration is braided like a dance: coattails, threads, signals, and touch carrying us forward together. This network holds the ongoingness of relation, asking how we keep making, despite distance, despite time."],   
];
    
    let questions = [   
      [
        "What is something you carry with you from your kin?"
        "What stories do your tools tell?"
        "What have you inherited that shapes how you make?"
        "Whose knowledge do you build on?"
      ],
      [
        "What is an important 'technical' (re)source you want to share?"
        "What material histories live in your tools?"
        "How do you share responsibility for what you use?"
        "What systems would you like to rewire?"
      ],
      [
        "What helps you to stay connected to others?",
        "What does collaboration feel like?",
        "When have you felt part of something larger?",
        "What keeps a connection alive?"
      ],

https://hackersanddesigners.nl/connecting-through-seams-installation.html:

ﾟ･:･｡ Further reading:

During our time together, we asked: What if crip time was not just something that was always with us in the ways that our disabled bodyminds meet the world, but also a collective layer of temporality and experience that we could invite others to tap into? We called this layer a crip time ocean, and we developed steering wheels for navigating its currents. From: “Criptastic Postscript,” H&D Bulletin #7: https://hackersanddesigners.nl/hd-bulletin-7.html >>>

Suspending pressures of efficiency and productivity we imagine and foster other space-times that are marked by refusal and will disperse before becoming static and finite. “Unruly Currents,” H&D Bulletin #5: https://hackersanddesigners.nl/hd-bulletin-5.html >>>

We invite you to ride the unruly/unexpected/fantastic undercurrents of crip time with us and create other collective imaginaries for interfacing with crip time that counter the universalist assumption that all bodies and minds experience time and space similarly. Compulsory techno-capitalist paradigms of time-efficiency, consistent and seamless labor performance and presumed able-bodiedness pattern time structures that are inaccessible for many people. “Steering Criptime,” H&D Bulletin #5: https://hackersanddesigners.nl/hd-bulletin-5.html >>>

    
This document is created with octomode, a collective editing space for PDF making that uses Etherpad, Paged.js, and Flask. Octomode is building upon the knowledge and practices of many designers and developers who work with and contribute to open-source and web-to-print approaches to making publications. It is for everyone who enjoys writing, coding and designing side by side and looks for ways to escape, divest, and boycott big tech companies that create unaffordable, inaccessible black box software and are complicit in the genocidal war on Palestine. 

This instance of octomode is further developed and hosted on the server of Hackers & Designer and is subject to H&D's code of conduct: https://hackersanddesigners.nl/code-of-conduct  
Octomode https://cc.vvvvvvaria.org/wiki/Octomode

Typefaces: BackOut & Director-Regular (Velvetyne)

License
Collective Commitment to Reuse (CC2r)
Hackers & Designers, 2026.
Copyleft with a difference:
This is a collective work, you are invited to copy, distribute, and modify it under the terms of the CC2r.
https://cc2r.net/

Image description on reverse: Four close-ups of a patchwork textile with stitched-in e-ink displays. The piece combines fabrics with anti-slip matt, woven cable ties, grommets, and exposed stitching. Wires, cable ties, and electronic components are integrated into the fabric. The e-ink displays show: "Open tabs from a month ago", "Braids, literally and figuratively", "A well-worn keyboard", and "AI: Ancestral intelligence."