String Figures takes its title from techno-feminist Donna Haraway’s metaphor for the inextricable threads that connect us all.

After Covid-19 radically changed our working practices in 2020, I worked with designer Bettina Nissen and creative technologist Bob Moyler to co-design prototype collaborative software for collective working centred on a principle of mutual care and co-operation. Adapted from a print-block mapping toolkit I designed for The People's Bank of Govanhill String Figures allows local and trans-local collectives to collaborate in a non-profit online space, building de-centralised support networks through encrypted visual diagrams.

As our every experience is commodified online and our inter-relationships are increasingly trackable, traceable, and data-mineable the project looks at how we can take more care in our digital lives.
If the web 2.0 is a racist, transphobic, misogynist cesspool of extraction and exploitation, then let’s imagine the feminist tools of the new web, a digital commons where we can pool our collective resources to build the systems we need to support each other. A space where we are not mind-controlled by state-corporate collaborations but able to collaborate with our peers in a way that can never be owned or co-opted or sold back to us.

For more on the thinking behind String Figures visit Antipode and Economythologies.

The current version of String Figures was developed in prototyping workshops with Guerilla Media Collective, Furtherfield, Feminist Economics Department, Category Is Books, Rumpus Room, Arc Independent South East Integration Network and Feminist Exchange Network.

Funded by Creative Scotland and Creative Informatics, Edinburgh College of Art.

String Figures follows on from Crypto-Knitting-Circles action research with Bettina Nissen in 2019.