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

Why

In graduate school I was part of a ‘workshop’ that had been started by one of my advisors (Wendy Griswold) 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.  It’s called ‘pulp.’  We want it to have the feel of that ongoing workshop: open, collegial, intense, and rewarding.

We’re developing pulp to serve that function 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.  And it is not a running commentary in short form on topics of the day—there are more than enough of those already.  But in the breadth of contributors, and in the evolution of new ideas, we hope it will be something to keep an eye on, a link to, a feed from.



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 will be the current  works-in-progress by the authors who are part of the pulp community.  Alongside it will be the archives of completed (or at least temporarily put aside) work and ‘strands’ of emerging topics.  The site will (eventually) be available for reading and searching by anyone who registers –we want to be linked and tweeted and fed as much as anyone -- 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.”  As a short term strategy, we’ve decided that we’ll work for a few months with a small group of writers to begin to ‘populate’ the site.

The site will be built primarily to support the dialogue between writer (or writers) and their critical community.  We’ll have links to tools and services such as proofreading, communications design, and information/library sciences research. Collections of people and work into ‘writing groups’ for specialized topics will, as the community gets larger, become absolutely central.  We’ll track reading, downloading, and comment statistics for authors and works.  We’ll have 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 much more aware of your work.  You’ll have control over who can comment, which versions are available, and what you want to do with the work when it is done.  And we’d like the group of editors to grow, to become the core of the site’s evolution and (collaborative) governance.

The four main categories will be Works in Progress (“WIPs” ); Strands, which are more like a conventional discussion thread, though built around an author’s specific questions; Archives for completed articles, and the community of contributors in Folks, including the professional services vetted by the community (design, editorial, etc.).   We’ll feature new versions of each.   We’ll support tagging and cross referencing.  Acknowledgement and citation are central to the kind of collegial culture we want to build.  pulp will not be for cases (that’s The ACME Review’s job), but for theory, method, review, integration, synthesis, and exploration.

Authors
Contributors from any of the disciplines, with any type of affiliation, at any level of seniority, involved in the work of the field are welcome.  That’s kind of the point.  But we think that it won’t work with a disproportionate group of passive ‘lurkers.’  We want to 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.  A group of authors/editors (the editors are inviting a group of ‘founding’ authors: if you are reading this, we think you would be one of them) will review applications to become an author.  Authors can post a kernel of an idea (in the ‘strands’) or a work already in development (in ‘work in progress’) and receive feedback, critique and encouragement as they bring their work to life.

We would love to have short biographies of each of the authors.  On the order of:

Rick E Robinson is a researcher who has been around a block or two in this field.  Credits include co-founding e-lab, being the first Chief Experience Officer (at Sapient, in 2000).  He struggles with being wordy, but has pretty good technique on his beat up & beloved Salomon Super Mountains.

Anna Muoio has interviewed more famous people than Barbara Walters (well, almost), and has the longest publication list of anyone at Continuum.  She’s a Barnard girl but we don’t hold that against her because she is a damn good writer and speaks flawless Italian.

We’re also working on a bit of code/service that will, for every pulp author, develop a ‘monogram’ that will serve as an avatar on pulp and ACME Review.  Way better than bad headshots.  Here’s Delilah’s example (DRZ):

Visitors

For the reading and scanning side, pulp will also have simple ‘subscribers’ (anyone have a better term?).  We’re hoping that this will include students, colleagues in business, editors and journalists.    We think that there will be a way for these folks to introduce themselves to the community, and eventually become authors themselves (if that’s what they would like to be) – but we’re still working out how to balance that against the desire to filter out the lightweight and unengaged comment types.

A sample Work in Progress context note:
Putting work up will, when the site is live, go through a short template that will provide for acknowledgements, version history, and the like.  One of the more important things we’ll need will be a short statement by the author about the work and how they hope it will develop.  For example, I’ve been thinking about turning a presentation I did some time ago into a chapter in a book I’ve gotten partially worked out.  I’d like to put it up on pulp because it is still a bit flaky.  So, I’d write something like this:

“Uncertain Answers” got started as a presentation to a conference on brands and marketing in Tokyo in 2003.  Later that year, I gave a revised version to a retailing conference (I’ll dig up the name).  And in the process of doing that, I wrote more notes for the ppt than I normally do.  There was something I liked about the argument that led me to turn it from a presentation into a rough draft.  But it never got “there” for me.  So I set it aside.  I think that its solid point is the way it talks about the ‘point’ of doing research in the design process.  I’m reworking it here as a chapter, rather than a standalone.  I’d appreciate attention to both the premise and the way I work out how to make it useful in the last section.  That’s where it feels the flakiest to me.”

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.

When a piece is “done” from the author’s point of view, it will be archived as a finished work, and taken out of the work-in-progress stream. It may, from that point, be going on to another life as a company white paper or a magazine article, or a book.  We think Pulp might become a ‘proto-publishing’ site, of interest to editors, publishers, media outlets.  But getting from a notion to a book takes time, and many of us have full time jobs and clients and projects to do.  Hence, the idea is that even getting the draft version up and out where it can be seen, read, and cited, is better than just letting it sit around until you have ‘time to focus’ on it.

There are longer versions of this doc and more on The ACME Review.  At EPIC in August in Chicago (whose idea was that!?) I’ll be able to show and talk more about both.  Ask, and they shall be yours to read and treasure.  For an introduction, it seems like this is plenty, especially since the beta is tantalizingly close…