pulp: a writer’s salon at the intersection of design, social science, and business.

In graduate school I was part of a ‘workshop’ that had been started by one of my advisers (Wendy Griswold now at Northwestern University) on the ‘Sociology of Culture.’  There wasn’t a curriculum.  Wendy didn’t lecture.  There were no grades. It went across academic quarters, year over year (I was part of it for four of them), with an evolving composition of graduate students and faculty members from across the university.

We presented work in progress. We shared drafts of papers and chapters. We critiqued what we read and we argued (productively) about what we were working on. In the workshop, the papers and the arguments grew and developed (and sometimes died) as their authors brought new versions back for another round. It was perhaps the single most valuable part of my graduate education.

I think that having something like that workshop would be a very good thing to have now, in the professional context, with a different, even more diverse group of colleagues.  So we’ve started to develop one, and this is it.  We want it to have the feel of the workshop that Wendy developed: open, collegial, intense, and rewarding.

We’re developing pulp for the community of folks who think about and practice in the intersection of design, the interpretive social sciences, technology, and business.  The kinds of work that go by the names of ‘interaction design’ or ‘user centered research’ or ‘design strategy’ just to pick a few.  The idea of a salon (think Dorothy Parker and the Algonquin Round Table) gets at what we are after pretty well.  pulp is not any one person’s blog.  It is not a running commentary in short form on topics of the day.



What pulp is ‘about’
pulp is being developed by and for folks who are trying to figure out some aspect of how we all work, of what is important about it, and where the field (fields?) we’re engaged with might be headed.  We don’t know where, exactly, that is. We have different backgrounds and specific interests, but pulp isn’t a blog “about” service design, or “about” design thinking or ethnographic research or any of a dozen other topics that somehow, add up to the emerging whole of a field. But any of those might be what one of us is working on in one of the pieces at any given point in time.

It has seemed for some time that this space has been in need of a place for both new folks to find their feet, get introduced to some of the central tenets and core dialogues, and at the same time, allowing the edges of the field to get explored, developed, and extended.   Collectively, as they evolve toward ‘done’ we think that both the articles and the discourse around them will feed the larger dynamic of the work.  Will help to shape the future of this emerging field.  That’s why the ‘working on’ aspect is most important to us.

How it will work (we think).
pulp is organized around the give and take of criticism around a “work-in-progress” (aka a “WIP”)   At the top level of the site are current  works-in-progress by the authors who are part of the pulp community.  Alongside those are the archives of completed (or at least temporarily put aside) work and ‘strands’ of emerging topics.  The site will be available for reading and searching by anyone who registers, but only the community of authors and critical readers will be able to post articles or add comments and criticism.  We are explicitly trying to structure pulp so that we don’t get “LOL! Thx for posting!!” types of posts from users like “anxiousweasel82.”

pulp is here primarily to support the dialogue between writer (or writers) and their critical community.  We have "@pulp.com" email addresses if you need them (sometimes, you just need to write something outside of work).  Part of what we want to do for each author, each article, is to build a following in advance of publication.  To engage the ‘wisdom of crowds’ when it makes sense, and to make a much wider audience more aware of your work.

The four main categories are:

Works in Progress (“WIPs” )  Book outlines, article drafts, conference presentations.  Theory, review, speculation, argument.  All good.  Promotional pieces, simple case studies, self-aggrandizing stunts and ad hominem arguments not good.  Pitched overboard immediately.

Strands, which are more like a conventional discussion thread, though built around an author’s specific questions;

Archives for completed articles,or unpublished papers put up by the authors; and

Authors are a community of contributors  from more than a few disciplines, with many types of affiliation and  levels of seniority, involved in the work of this field.  That’s kind of the point.   We do distinguish between folks who are working on stuff, and engaged with other author’s works, from folks who just want to read or scan (though we want them to do that).  So, ‘authors’ will be by application or invitation, and require contributing at least one work in progress.

We have some pretty strongly held views on the importance of citation & acknowledgement, and how critical those are to building a community of practice.  So check out the "House Rules" on the About page. pulp will not be for cases (that’s The ACME Review’s job), but for theory, method, review, integration, synthesis, and exploration.

Authors

Where Pulp WIPs go
We are committed to increasing the circulation and citation of the work we are all doing to further the discourse and thinking in the field. We hope that the work here will provide practitioners, students, colleagues more things to read, more things to think with.  To that end, we’re going to make it an easy part of uploading to add a Creative Commons license to the works, even the drafts.  In other words, what’s up here, we expect and hope that people will use, but give credit where it is due.  We promise to do the same.