Anja Groten

About the lecture  

“I am frequently asked how we do this… How does Hackers & Designers self-organise? How have we managed to sustain this collective practice since our first meetup in 2013? How do we pull this off while resources are becoming scarcer, and it is increasingly difficult to sustain spaces for experimentation—spaces that embrace process rather than products, cherish collective learning, and resist techno-solutionism?”

In this talk, Anja will trace the turbulent paths of collective organising, drawing on experiences of working with self-organised groups, specifically the Hackers & Designers collective. By exploring the intersections of self-organisation, self-publishing, and self-hosting digital infrastructures, the talk will propose non-linear understandings of the design process, challenging conventional notions of disciplinarity, efficiency, authorship, and ownership. She will share various collective attempts—subtle tactics that shift the discourse around technical innovation and design—from narratives of progress to an understanding of collective practice as a consciously slow and self-reflexive process of mutual entanglement. 

Bio

Anja Groten (DE, NL) is a designer, researcher and educator based in Amsterdam. Anja's work revolves around the cross-section of digital and physical media, design and art education and the involvement in different interdisciplinary collectives such as Hackers & Designers and the Feminist Search Tools. In 2022 Anja completed her PhD in Artistic Research at PhDArts (Academy of Creative and Performing Arts, Leiden University) as part of the NWO-funded ‘Making Matters’ research group. Since 2019, Anja has been leading the Design Master’s program at the Sandberg Instituut, Master of the Rietveld Academie, in Amsterdam. As of 2024, she supervises PhD candidates at PhDArts as an assistant professor of design theory and practice.