Line of enquiry
I’m starting this brief late, so what follows is less a description of finished iterations than an honest map of where my thinking is sitting right now. Across Unit 1 and the questions I kept asking in Methods and Media for Digital Culture, the same thread keeps surfacing: what does it mean to make work inside digital systems that you also want to critique? I asked it in different shapes each time. In Methods of Investigating, it became a question about surveillance and how soft control hides behind seamless public space. In Methods of Cataloguing, it became a question about who gets to write history and what an archive quietly leaves out. In Methods of Translating, it became a question about how much can be communicated through reduction rather than excess. What I’m taking into these 100 iterations is the suspicion that all three of those questions are really one question wearing different clothes. They’re about visibility. About what a system shows you and what it keeps out of view. So my snippet, the iteration zero, is going to come from the haiku generator I built in p5.js, because it’s the place where this question sits closest to the surface. I want to use the iterations to test whether a tool can keep its own workings legible while it works, and what happens to meaning when reduction, friction, and limitation get treated as the medium rather than something to design around. I don’t know yet what the iterations will become. That’s part of the point of starting.
Annotated bibliography
1. Lialina, O. (2015) Turing Complete User. Available at: http://contemporary-home-computing.org/turing-complete-user/ (Accessed: 26 April 2026).
“Computers became doors without doorknobs.” Brenda Laurel, cited in Lialina
This line keeps haunting me. I’ve been quoting it back to myself every time I open a piece of software and feel like I’m being walked through a corridor with no side rooms. Lialina’s argument that the user has been quietly written out of computing is what made me pay attention to my own habits in the first place. I noticed I’d stopped questioning anything. The defaults felt like physics. Working through these iterations, the doorknob image became practical advice rather than just a metaphor. Every iteration I make, I’m trying to leave the doorknob on. Show the seams. Let the next person see how it was made and break it apart if they want to. This sits behind everything in my project, but it especially shapes the moments when I’m tempted to smooth something over for the sake of looking finished.
2. Seu, M. (ed.) (2023) Cyberfeminism Index. New York: Inventory Press.
“The internet is not only a network of cables, servers, and computers. It is an environment that shapes and is shaped by its inhabitants and their use.”
Seu started this project as a Google Sheet and let it grow into a book that nearly a thousand people contributed to. The form is the point. I keep coming back to the Index because it makes a different kind of argument than most theory does. It doesn’t try to define cyberfeminism, it just gathers it, accepts the contradictions, and lets the reader find their own thread. That gave me permission to stop trying to make my iterations cohere into a single statement and let them act like an index too, with patterns that emerge across the set rather than within any one of them. There’s also something useful in how Seu treats infrastructure as content: the Google Sheet, the website, the book, all carry the same material into different conditions. My iterations work that way as well. The same small idea keeps moving between p5.js, print, and screen, and what changes each time isn’t the content but what the medium will let it do.
3. Menkman, R. (2011) The Glitch Moment(um). Network Notebooks 04. Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures.
“The dominant, continuing search for a noiseless channel has been, and will always be, no more than a regrettable, ill-fated dogma.”
Menkman gave me a way to think about error as material rather than failure. Most design training pushes you to clean things up, debug, polish out the artefacts. Menkman flips that: the artefact is the thing. The compression, the corruption, the moment a file doesn’t render the way it’s “supposed” to, that’s where you can actually see the system you’re working inside. Reading her alongside making my iterations changed how I treat the moments when my code doesn’t behave. The haiku generator produces nonsense regularly. Words land in the wrong order, parts of speech mismatch, the rhythm collapses. I used to fix those. Now I keep them. Some of my best iterations are the ones where the reduction went too far and broke the meaning open. Menkman taught me that’s not the iteration failing, that’s the iteration showing me where the rules of language and the rules of code disagree.
4. Chang, S. (2024) We’re All (Folk) Programmers. Available at: https://joinreboot.org/p/folk-programmers (Accessed: 26 April 2026).
“Folk programming is the (re)programming we learn through our active use of the Internet and software.”
Chang reframes coding as something more like cooking or storytelling than engineering, a vernacular practice ordinary people have always done, just under names that didn’t sound technical. This matters to my method directly. I’m not a trained programmer. The haiku generator I built is held together with YouTube tutorials, the RiTa.js documentation, and a lot of trial and error. For a long time I thought that meant the work was somehow lesser, that real tools came from real engineers and what I was doing was a pale imitation. Chang lets me drop that. The iterations are folk-programmed by definition: I’m using libraries other people made, snippets I copied from forums, things I half-understand, and bending all of it to do what I want. That’s not a flaw in the work. That’s where the work lives. It also reframes who the iterations are for. Not other designers in some imagined critical-design audience, but anyone who has ever pasted code they didn’t fully understand into a project and made it run.
5. Giampietro, R. (2003) Default Systems in Graphic Design. Available at: https://linedandunlined.com/archive/default-systems-in-graphic-design/ (Accessed: 26 April 2026).
“Default systems are machines for design creation.”
Giampietro is the reference that holds my critical position. He’s the one who lets me name what I’m pushing against. The reason I’m writing my own tiny tools instead of working in Illustrator isn’t aesthetic preference, it’s political. I just didn’t have the vocabulary for that until I read him. Giampietro shows how the menus, presets, and defaults of design software aren’t neutral conveniences, they’re machines that produce a particular kind of look and a particular kind of thinking. Reading him alongside making the iterations made me realise how much of my work in Unit 1 had quietly been shaped by what Adobe makes easy. The iterations are partly a way of unlearning that. They’re deliberately small, and the choices they offer are the ones I built, not the ones I inherited from a software company that doesn’t know me and isn’t designing for me.
6. Kaiser, A. and Stephany, R. (eds.) (2021) Glossary of Undisciplined Design. Leipzig: Spector Books. (Entry: M for Monster’s Tools.)
“M for Monster’s Tools” — entry from the Glossary of Undisciplined Design, a feminist unpacking of graphic design’s “dogmatic rules, discriminatory structures and a particularly one-sided canon.”
The Glossary refuses the format of the textbook. It moves alphabetically through visual essays, poems, advertorials, speculative tales, and the entry on Monster’s Tools especially keeps coming back to me. It picks up Audre Lorde’s “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house” and asks what a different kind of tool might look like, one that doesn’t politely participate in the system it claims to critique. That question is doing a lot of work in my iterations. I keep checking myself: am I making something that actually works differently, or am I just making Illustrator-shaped objects with a slightly weirder surface? The Glossary’s answer is that the form has to be undisciplined too. A tool that’s monstrous, that refuses to behave, that breaks the discipline before the discipline can absorb it. That’s the standard I’m trying to hold the iterations to, even when I don’t always meet it.
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