These three words; community activation, knowledge sharing and collaboration through letterpress printing

Abstract

Commoners Press is a small, newly established experimental letterpress studio in North Coburg,
Australia. As part of the 2022 Melbourne Design Week, Commoners Press presented the project these
three words in response to the festival’s theme of ‘civic spaces’. This article discusses the project as an
example of a mode of public pedagogy (Charman & Dixon, 2021) which enables moments of collective
reflection, inclusiveness, community activation, local knowledge sharing as well as collaborative
making, creative exploration, social aspiration and being together. The project asked participants to
respond to the provocation: Thinking about the future liveability of your community, what three words
come to mind? Participants set their ‘three words’ in type and they were letterpress printed in a moment
that externalised and materialised participants’ concepts in ink and paper. Thus the redundant
technology of letterpress introduced – through its labour and slowness – a sense of mindfulness,
achievement and ‘access to the means of production’ that elevated participants’ words into a public
collaborative endeavour. As each participants’ printed words were revealed, they were celebrated and
discussed within the group. A week later participants were given the opportunity to attend a roundtable
to reflect on their own and others’ ‘three words’ as a collective imagining of possible futures, all
different, all together (Escobar, 2017). The pedagogy here brought participants together to form an
“interpretive community” (Santos, 2017) by allowing them to teach one another new things about
community, collaboration, creativity, and what the future may hold.