Collective Commons Documentation

Collective Commons documentation was a digital documentation system tested by the Building Movements project in 2012. The original idea developed from the Public Research Symposium (PRS) posters displayed on the wall in the Design Hub (image below). Each poster represented a post graduate research project however it was often hard to tell from the image and abstract the depth and range of the projects and if researchers had overlapping interests. The collective documentation was a strategy to allow for more complex stories and varied points of connection to become apparent in collaborative projects or collections of projects.

The Collective Commons platform was designed to be a blank canvas where the documentation of the a collaborative event was created through the participants contributing their own views and versions of the project. Each participant uploaded to a ‘deck’ images, notes, gifs and drawings as the project progressed. The structure allowed different emphasis, points of view and interests to emerge that might otherwise be overlooked by a professional documentation which usually focuses on a narrative of process or a completed outcome. Participants could scroll through collections of images or move the collections around to create new juxtapositions. The images were tagged with key words which when searched would collect together images tagged with the same key words- creating or rendering visible, previously unseen connections across the project and the collaborators.