About
The H&D COOP
Hackers & Designers (H&D) is a conglomerate of practitioners from different fields and backgrounds (technology, design, art, and education) currently operating between Amsterdam, Rotterdam and Brussels. H&D is organized in a cooperative fashion, distributing responsibility over finances and decision making. Members of the collective are: Loes Bogers, Selby Gildemacher, Anja Groten, Heerko van der Kooij, Juliette Lizotte, Karl Moubarak, Pernilla Manjula Philip, slvi.e and vo ezn.
H&D Activities
H&D pursues its goals by developing annual activity programs consisting of interconnected hands-on workshops, public lectures, performances, game and hack events, meet-ups, experiments in publishing, and the annual H&D Summer Camp – a 10–14 day immersive workshop program. H&D organizes activities from the idea of a flattened hierarchy. Tutors and mentors become participants, participants become workshop leaders – everyone is taken on the collective venture of shared responsibility – bringing into conversation their own expertise, urgencies and experiences. Along with organizing participant-empowering hands-on workshop H&D builds and maintains free and open source tools, self-hosts technical infrastructures and produces on - and offline publications. Inspired by intersectional trans*feminist thought and practice H&D stimulates collaboration across differences (age, gender, race, ability, skills, interests, species, materials) and aims to imagine and work together toward desirable techno-social and eco-conscious futures.
The H&D Network
H&D operates locally in the Netherlands as well as internationally. Since 2019 H&D operates from a shared studio at NDSM loods in Amsterdam, which serves as our ‘headquarters,’ where we meet, develop workshops, and sometimes also host guests and public programs. H&D's overall objective is to stimulate and support exchange within a larger international network of hackers, designers, artists, and researchers, who find it relevant to critically challenge and actively reimagine monocultures and monopolizations of invasive and extractivist platforms and tools. The H&D network could also be described as a network of tool makers. By tools we mean software and/or hardware constructions but also pedagogical tools and tools for collaboration that enable critical engagement with, and through, technology. The network reaches to places such as Armenia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, China, Czech Republic, Denmark, France, Germany, Ireland, U.S.A., Romania, Russia, Slovakia, South Korea, Switzerland, The United States of America, Aotearoa (formerly known as New Zealand), and Zimbabwe. Sister initiatives take off around the world and feed back into H&D, for instance through the H&D Summer Camp.
H&D Code of Conduct
While H&D activities are organized from the idea of a flattened hierarchy, it is important to ensure an environment of mutual respect that is safe and welcoming for all participants. H&D therefore wrote a Code of Conduct, and will continue writing, reviewing, and incorporating new insights into it. This document intends to make explicit what it takes for us as a community to create such a safe environment and what to do when it is at risk: H&D Code of Conduct
Collaborators
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Hackers & Designers is generously funded by Stimuleringsfonds Creatieve Industrie since 2015.
