Parallel Practices and the Dialectics of Open Creative Production

Abstract

For over a decade, design culture portals have hosted online resources such as tutorials, examples of compelling design and links to other design-related websites. Although now surpassed by other social media, portals can be viewed as signifi cant communication centres and virtual gathering spaces. These design-culture community websites have also exposed the tensions between production and consumption, professional and amateur practices, work and play and expression/exploration and service. Evolving practices, enabled by networked technologies, have supported a reputation-based system of knowledge building and resource distribution that allow for modest, open creative cultural production to grow outside the commercial realm. While this parallel practice has promoted an expansion of our notion of creative production, it has also been fed in part by corporate mythologies that contribute to the precarious nature of contemporary creative work. The community’s designed artefacts, including shared resources and tools such as the portal itself, have subsequently revealed struggles over cultural production in the early Web design era and, perhaps, a more nuanced view of the creative knowledge worker.