Open Process Automation status update

With the help of facebook groups Mushrooming can go beyond traditional coworking platforms. Photos from Artlab Productions during Open Studios happening, by Elina Alatalo.

Mushrooming is a very special platform for coworking culture. It is not simply only about dealing rental announcements of coworking spaces. At first look, it might seem so: the internet page of Mushrooming is at the moment mostly a service presenting renting out adds. The activities in facebook groups concern mainly similar kinds of announcements of coworking communities searching for a new member to share the space with.

But in facebook groups there are also postings from individuals that are looking for a specific space with certain amenities, something that has not been available in the renting out pool.

Here we come to the first point where Mushrooming differs from other platforms for sharing workspace, such as Desktime, Wework or Sharedesk. In our city based local facebook groups the searchers of a space can be active as well. The inquiries can be as complex as life is: Does someone have a space where I could work with laptop, test some new clay molding techniques and play guitar in the evenings? Does anyone have a room 6 metres high? Who has a workspace where I could enter easily with my wheelchair? Inquiries create another channel for spatial needs to surface and be met.

Similarly renting out announcements can be something else, than a prestructured internet service allows: Does anyone want to rent my desk every other week-end? Who else would like to use this old printing machine in our cellar and share the rent?

This is how Mushrooming has grown to unexpected directions: with the help of facebook groups. New types of workingspaces are popping up every now and then. Some want to share a kitchen, another a big storage. There are yoga rooms or hairdressers chairs shared. This brings new professions to the network and that is very interesting. What happens when graphic designer, musician, economist and physiatrist share their working space every day? New types of spaces and new professions entering the coworking scene compound a rich variety that creates valuable sustainability to the coworking culture.

This variety is the second point where Mushrooming is unique. It is clear that more there are people from any professions, more we have coworking collectives. This creates more possibilities for different kinds of people to personalised spaces, communities and individual rhytms of work.

If the existing coworking spaces do not fit your needs, or are all full, through local groups you can start to create a new collective. This is neither possible in other coworking platforms, that we know of. You can invite people for a meeting. Anyone can also create a happening that somehow links to coworking. This is were we come to the fruits of the network. Of course it is already lot to share a space with interesting like-minded, but how about getting to know the neighbours as well?

This is actually how Mushrooming got started, out of curiosity to know what happens in other small independent coworking spaces, who are the people and what we could do together? The big need to deal rental announcements came only later on, and Mushrooming answered to the need by developing services for it. But let's not forget the curiosity, we have a lot undiscovered potential in the network!

Aim of Mushrooming is to be an open process. New functions and practices for the network can pop up. Anyone can try out new ideas, new happenings or develop new services, the community will adopt the working ones and protest if something goes wrong. Here facebook groups act as good first platforms, but there also comes the time when meeting face to face is indispensable.

Hello! Thank you so much! And hey, what a good question.

Have you ever held or worn an Underworks binder? They have binding-strength spandex mesh on all sides, too. Their design, which mine is based off of, has one layer of flattening mesh on the back and two or three layers in the front.

Underneath, my binders are constructed basically the same way. One layer of binding mesh in back, two or three (usually two) layers in the front, and then a sheath of fashion fabric over the top. The fashion fabric is a more flexible spandex, which I’ve learned through experience does not bind well on its own after about two or three wears. (It stretches out to accomodate the chest and doesn’t spring back. After awhile, my very first merman binder was basically a tank top.) So the additional fashion fabric is no danger at all, because it’s less binding than the underlayer and stretches easily when you inhale.

As for whether the underlayer is dangerous when wrapped all around - nope! When properly sized, power mesh spandex expands with the lungs when you inhale, and stops contracting before you completely exhale. There is a lower limit to its contraction - at “rest”, it’s wrapped firmly around your ribcage and smooshing your chest in, but not actively squeezing in from the back. (This is in direct contrast to Ace bandages, which are designed to be wrapped so that they just keep squeezing and squeezing from all directions until you bruise a rib.)

In general, if you’re binding and you start feeling serious chest pains, you should absolutely take it off. If it’s one of my binders, please do tell me! As my Etsy customers will tell you, I have a policy of re-sizing non-fitting binders for free. You don’t spend $55 at my store to end up with something that suffocates you, I just won’t stand for that. 

Art is contextual, we are all products of our society and we are what we are because we lived what we lived. This is also the idea of materialism in philosophy and the question of the artist’s property in contemporary art.

 The artist is a researcher describing his reality with his senses and feelings in forms that produces meanings on its own. This means that through all the process the artist does not own his ideas but the process itself. He is responsible of his own choices but his ideas did not came out of nowhere, it had a life before and after his exhibitions his ideas but also his work will continue to live without him in the society.

Research is an open process; we do not own our ideas. The society does! All we can sell is our work.

You can be hanged for visiting our site.

It’s not often I get to take on a project where the client lives in that context, but this is reality for Radio Free Europe. RFE delivers news and truth to some of the most information-starved countries and people groups in the world, and I can’t help but be impressed. We met with a small team in Prague; sometimes eight members, sometimes 15, but never a huge committee, and never with a hierarchical room of Directors and VPs. Everyone cares, nobody has just one purpose, and the atmosphere of actionable outcomes is tangible.

With content carrying this type of consequence, and the team being small and intent, there’s a crystal clarity to the goal of everything we plan to do in redesigning rferl.org.

Get the message out.

SuperFriendly is wading into a atomic design process with RFE, and we want to share the experience openly on responsivedesign.rferl.org.

The iterative process with SuperFriendly will flow roughly like this:

Kickoff

Design Direction through element collages

Performance Budgeting

Design Production

Front End Development

Handoff

From there RFE will carry on with integration, content migration, and using the elements we create together to build out websites for sister organizations.

It’s a big process, distributed team, and a weighty purpose. Look for more updates on the responsivedesign.rferl.org blog as we progress. Also see intro posts to this process from other SuperFriendly team members Tim Kadlec and Dan Mall.