A speculative essay on transitions in publishing, design, and relation

Publishing at the Edge of Change

This essay begins as a kind of walk. Not toward a fixed destination, but into the shifting terrain of what we call Publishing Futures. It is not a blueprint, nor a manifesto, but a map drawn in motion — stitched together from readings, encounters, walks, and workshops. Our aim is not to define the future of publishing, but to figure it out together, to borrow Anja Groten’s phrase (2022).

To publish is to make public — but what kind of public, and what kind of making, are we speaking of in a time of planetary transition? In the face of ecological breakdown, digital saturation, and institutional fatigue, this essay explores how publishing can become a practice of orientation, speculation, and care. It moves between theoretical reflection and embodied experience, weaving insights from Walking as Research Practice (2020), Anja Groten’s Figuring Things Out Together (2022), and the quiet radicalism of Erling Kagge’s Walking: One Step at a Time (2019).

Alongside these, we draw on thinkers of relation, rupture, and resistance: Édouard Glissant (1997), Sara Ahmed (2006), Anna Tsing (2015), Donna Haraway (2016), Tim Ingold (2011), Chantal Mouffe (2000), and Jacques Rancière (2010). What emerges is not a doctrine but a poetics of relation — a way of sensing and enacting publishing as an ecological, political, and speculative gesture.

Before diving into the analytical heart of the essay, we offer a speculative vignette — a story that gestures toward another kind of worlding.

Prologue: The Archive of Small Transitions

Lisboa, 2043.

It began with a table. Foldable, light, and solar-powered. A group of young practitioners — walkers, editors, coders, and gardeners — gathered around it at the site of a former motorway turned green corridor. No manifestos, no logos. Just a slow rhythm: walk, document, share. Each week they “published” a new segment of the city through situated readings, annotated walks, annotated soil samples, and collective cartographies.

These ephemeral gatherings formed what they called the Archive of Small Transitions. Neither utopian nor nostalgic, the archive was pragmatic and porous. It hosted tools, voices, rituals, leftovers. Among its contributors were children, elders, non-humans, and machines. Each entry was incomplete by design. Some took the form of solar zines; others were oral footnotes, accessed by stepping onto sound-triggered stones. Many were unreadable to traditional indexing systems.

The archive had no center. It grew by drift.

Its ethic? Publish not to declare, but to attune. Share not to fix, but to invite. Each act was a step away from extraction, and toward entanglement.

Publishing as Errantry: The Step That Listens

To walk is to think, writes Kagge (2019), but also to remember. It is to measure one’s life not by productivity, but by attention. Yet we must also acknowledge that walking, as commonly understood, presumes a normative body — one that moves upright, without assistance. This is a limited view. The walking we refer to here is expansive: it includes all forms of embodied movement through space and relation. It is attentive rolling, assisted motion, mental traversal. It welcomes prosthetic, impaired, fragile, and differently configured bodies. It values sensation over speed, perception over posture. Walking becomes a ritual of resistance — against speed, against forgetting, against the illusion of progress. The walker is both witness and weaver. In Walking as Research Practice (2020), walking is framed as a relational, performative, and feminist epistemology — one that “knows through presence” and “moves with care.”

In this framing, publishing becomes an expanded field — a way of making legible, of marking time and space. It becomes situated, embodied, and partial. This resonates with Haraway’s (2016) call to “stay with the trouble,” to resist abstraction and cultivate multispecies entanglement.

This kind of walking is political. As Ahmed (2006) reminds us, orientation matters. The ability to move freely through space is unevenly distributed. Who gets to walk, and where? Whose stories leave a trace, and whose get erased?

Glissant’s (1997) notion of errantry deepens this frame: “in errantry one knows at every moment where one is — at every moment in relation to the other” (p. 11). Walking, in this sense, is a relational gesture. It is neither aimless nor teleological. It is a method for being-with, for sensing the world as web, not grid.

Figuring Out the Workshop: Publishing in the Plural

Groten (2022) invites us into the collective dimension of publishing. Her work with Hackers & Designers foregrounds tools and togetherness, not outcomes. Publishing becomes infrastructural, iterative, and affective. The workshop is not a side event — it is the publication.

Founded in Amsterdam in 2015, Hackers & Designers is a community-driven initiative that brings together designers, technologists, artists, and educators in hands-on explorations of digital tools and infrastructures. Rejecting hierarchies between “users” and “makers,” the collective promotes open-source principles, peer learning, and speculative prototyping. Their activities span from intensive summer schools to collective tool-making experiments and distributed publishing formats. Their ethos is one of radical accessibility, conviviality, and disruption of disciplinary boundaries.

Ingold (2011) helps us understand this as correspondence: a mode of thinking-through-doing, of shaping while being shaped. Design, like walking, becomes a way of attending to the world. It is improvisational and ecological.

Groten rejects the smoothness of platforms and opts instead for non-smooth infrastructures — those that invite friction, dialogue, failure. This aligns with Rancière’s (2010) vision of politics as dissensus: the interruption of the given. To publish is to introduce a break, a redistribution of the sensible.

Here, we begin to see a convergence. Walking and workshop alike become forms of publishing otherwise: speculative, slow, interdependent. Tsing (2015) calls this the “arts of noticing.” Publishing futures, then, are not about scaling up, but about scaling with: fungi, tools, gestures, neighbors.

Transition as Method: Between Fiction and Infrastructure

In this constellation, fiction is not escape. It is method. It allows us to rehearse alternative modes of attention, authorship, and assembly. The Archive of Small Transitions is one such rehearsal. Its fragments, rituals, and refusals mirror many of the gestures we see in real-world practices: site-specific readers, co-designed typographies, walkable indexes, edible publications.

Mouffe (2000) reminds us that democracy must be agonistic — a space of legitimate contestation. Publishing, in this light, is not consensus-building. It is space-making: for disagreement, difference, opacity. Glissant’s (1997) right to opacity is a crucial principle here. Not all that is published must be rendered transparent.

The speculative imaginary of the Archive suggests how publishing can move from product to process, from communication to communing. What if publishing became more like composting — slow, layered, generative, entangled?

Toward a Poetics of Publishing Otherwise

As we return from the speculative future of the Archive, we see it mirrored in the present: in walks that become texts, in workshops that become commons, in zines that become recipes, in failures that become methods.

To publish otherwise is to move from certainty to curiosity. From extractive models to relational ones. From ownership to maintenance. This is not a retreat from politics, but a politics of reorientation — as Ahmed (2006) suggests, to turn differently is to feel differently.

Walking, designing, publishing: all become ways of holding space for transition. And perhaps, as Kagge (2019) reminds us, the most radical act is simply to walk. Slowly. Together. Toward what we do not yet know.

In the Archive of Small Transitions, a child picks up a leaf that was once used as a bookmark. She scans it into the mobile table’s surface, and a whispering voice recites the steps of a forgotten walk. The story is not complete. It never was.

References

Ahmed, S. (2006). Queer phenomenology: Orientations, objects, others. Duke University Press.

Glissant, É. (1997). Poetics of relation (B. Wing, Trans.). University of Michigan Press.

Groten, A. (2022). Figuring things out together: On the relationship between design and collective practice [Doctoral dissertation, Leiden University]. https://hdl.handle.net/1887/3487176

Haraway, D. J. (2016). Staying with the trouble: Making kin in the Chthulucene. Duke University Press.

Ingold, T. (2011). Being alive: Essays on movement, knowledge and description. Routledge.

Kagge, E. (2019). Walking: One step at a time (B. L. Crook, Trans.). Pantheon Books.

Mouffe, C. (2000). The democratic paradox. Verso.

Rancière, J. (2010). Dissensus: On politics and aesthetics. Continuum.

Tsing, A. L. (2015). The mushroom at the end of the world: On the possibility of life in capitalist ruins. Princeton University Press.

Walking as Research Practice (2020). University of the Arts London. [PDF manuscript].