Ruben Pater Resources

Welcome to this repository of resources made and collected by Ruben Pater for public use. For my design work see www.untold-stories.net

Bio 150 words

Ruben Pater is a designer at a moment in time when more design is about the last thing the world needs. In search of ethical alternatives he designs, writes, and teaches. After receiving his bachelor degree in graphic design, Ruben Pater worked as a designer for different studios in the Netherlands. His work experience led him to pursue a master degree at the Sandberg institute in Amsterdam, which he completed in 2012. His practice has combined journalism, activism, and graphic design under the name Untold Stories. He is the author of two books on visual communication and design; The Politics of Design (BIS, 2016) and CAPS LOCK (Valiz, 2021). He lives and works in Barcelona and teaches at the Elisava School of Design and Engineering and the BAU college of arts & design.

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Upcoming events

10.06.24 Festa del Grafisme, Portbou, ES
07.10.24 Culturas Materiales, Elisava máster de materiales, ES
14.10.24 Design Economies, Zürich, CH (online)
18.10.24 Recreo Book Fair, Valencia, ES
25.10.24 DESIGNA conference, Colvilhã, PT
25.11.24 GRAFILL, Oslo, NO
26.11.24 GRAFILL, Bergen, NO

Recent Past events

31.08.24 Libreria Prosa del Mundo, Bogotá, CO
29.08.24 Universidad de Los Andes, Bogotá, CO
26.04.24 AGRAFA, Katowice, PL
23.03.24 It’s a book, Leipzig, DE (online)
15.03.24 Feria Anarquista, Sevilla, ES
25.01.24 Werkplaats Typografie, Rotterdam, NL (online)

Books

CAPS LOCK (Valiz, 2021)
Capitalism could not exist without the coins, banknotes, documents, information graphics, interfaces, branding, and advertising made by graphic designers. Even strategies such as social design and speculative design are easily appropriated to serve economic growth. CAPS LOCK is a reference work that uses clear language and visual examples to show how graphic design and capitalism have come to be inextricably linked.

English version (original)
Spanish version

The Politics of Design (BIS, 2016)
Design is neither neutral nor apolitical. Through stereotypes and cultural misrepresentations, design is complicit in maintaining power structures. This books explores the cultural and political context of the typography, colours, photography, symbols, and information graphics that we use every day.

English version (original)
Portuguese version
Ukrainian version
Chinese version
Korean version

* If you buy books please do so at your local bookstore or directly from the publisher. Support bookstores not billionaires.

Articles in English

Not For Sale: Design and The Consumption Democracy, Frankfurt Design Capital, 2024 (PDF)
There are RATS in the library, Future Book(s), Valiz, 2024 (PDF)
‘Keep Mokum Weird: Squatting as Creative Resistance’, Slanted 41, 2023 (PDF)
Dreams in Ruins: The Metaverse Sounds Great Until You Have to Work in it, STRP festival, 2022
Futures for the Few, Realities for the Rest: Desiging Futures in the Face of the Climate Crisis, self-published, 2022
Statement at the New European Bauhaus Festival, self-published, 2022
A Better Environment Starts With Ourselves, Designers Write, 2021
Crypto-anarchism, self-published, 2022
‘The Branding of Bodies’, Otherworlds #1, 2021
Rabble Recognition, KABK, 2021 (PDF)
Trading Futures, KABK Research Group, 2019
‘One Size Fits All’, Modes of Criticism 5 — Design Systems , 2019 (PDF)
A Study Into 21st Century Drone Acoustics, Discrepant Records, 2017
The Machine as Curator, Sandberg institute, 2012
Designing Without Ego, self-published, 2011

Articles in Dutch

’Wat jij kunt doen’, Metropolis M, 2023 (PDF)
‘Horeca United: een nieuwe vakbond die horecabazen het vuur aan de schenen legt’, Buiten de Orde, 2023 (PDF)
’Een visuele geschiedenis van het antifascisme’, Buiten de Orde, 2022 (PDF)
‘Levende monumenten: een vijfdaagse workshop over design en activisme’, Buiten de Orde, 2022 (PDF)
’Crypto-anarchisme’, Buiten de Orde, 2022 (PDF)
‘Op naar een wereld zonder politie’, Buiten de Orde, 2021 (PDF)
Het Moreel Besef van symbolen, Zuiderzee museum, 2016 (PDF)

Assignments

Workshops

Carbon Culture, AGRAFA, Katowice, PL, 2024( PDF)
Design Action Zine, AGRAFA, Katowice, PL, 2024 (PDF)
Radical Pedagogy, AGRAFA, Katowice, PL, 2024 (PDF)
The Eyes of The Secret Cult, Design Hochschule Darmstadt, DE, 2023 (PDF)
Concrete Action, four day workshop art ArtEZ, Arnhem, NL, 2022 (PDF)
When Money Talks Back, LCC London, UK, 2022 (PDF)
Means of production, Porto Design Biennial, Porto, PT (website)
Means of production, Universität für angewandte Kunst, Vienna, AT, 2019 (PDF)
Two-City Walking Tour, Design Museum, London, UK, 2018 (PDF)
Portrait of a Park, Mimar Sinan University, Istanbul, TK, 2018
Digging Up Dirt, MA-GMD LCC, London, UK, 2017 (PDF)
Anarchist design ethics, MA graphic media design, HfK, Bern, CH, 2017, video documentation
Dark Fiction, with James Bryan Graves and Ramon Amaro, MA Non-Linear Narrative, Royal Academy of Arts, The Hague, NL, 2017 (PDF)
How do you spell populism? Sandberg institute, MA graphic design, Amsterdam, NL, 2016 (PDF)
Domestic Drone Defense, with Tijmen Schep, Hackers & Designers, Amsterdam, NL, 2014 (video documentation)

Recorded Lectures

Insights 2020, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, 2020
What is good? Deutsche Design Club, 2023
Periodismo Popular, Latinograficas, Asunción, Paraguay, 2022
INDIGO festival, Ljubljana, 2022
CAPS LOCK, DePaul University, Chicago, 2022
CAPS LOCK, Elisava talks, Barcelona, 2022
CAPS LOCK, Fachbereich Gestaltung Bielefeld, 2022
CAPS LOCK, AIGA design, New York, 2021
CAPS LOCK, Parsons Communications Design, New York, 2021
Vredesjournaal, Vredesburo, 2021 (Dutch)
DAE lecture series, Design Academy, Eindhoven, 2022
De ontwerper als aktivist, OPA Arnhem, 2020 (Dutch)
Class of Covid-19, Die Angewandte University of Applied Arts, Vienna, 2019
Trading Futures, KABK Annual Research Symposium, The Hague, 2019
It’s All Graphic #2: Activism and Graphic Design, Amsterdam, 2018
Design Column, Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, Rotterdam, 2018
Can the Universal Be Specific? Projekt Bauhaus, Berlin, 2017
On cryptography, Crypto Design Challenge, 2015
Drone Survival Guide, Click Festival, Helsingør, 2014

Interviews

Felix Kosok, Deutsche Design Club, 2024
Frederico Duarte, Electra, 2023
Sergi Vilà Bori and Edu Martínez Piracés, Elisava, 2022 (audio)
Steven Heller, Print Magazine, 2021
Jeroen Junte, Volkskrant, 2021 (Dutch)
Aynouk Tan with Lua Vollaard, Designers Write, 2021 (audio)
Lisa Baumgarten and Judith Leijdekkers, with Claude Nassar, Teaching Design, 2020
Jarrett Fuller, Scratching the Surface, 2017 (audio)
Régine Debatty, We Make Money Not Art, 2015

Book Recommendations Fall 2024

Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, 1963
Walter Mignolo, The Idea of Latin America, 2005
Fernando, Santos-Granero (ed), The Occult Life of Things: Native Amazonian Theories of Materiality and Personhood, 2009
Davi Kopenawa, The Falling Sky: Words of a Yanomami Shaman, 2013
adrienne maree brown, Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds, 2017
Noortje Marres, ’Why We Can’t Have Our Facts Back’, Engaging Science, Technology, and Society, 4, 2018 (pp.423-443)
Mahmoud Mamdani, Neither Settler Nor Native: The Making and Unmaking of Permanent Minorities, 2020
Vanessa Machado de Oliveira, Hospicing Modernity: Facing humanity’s Wrongs and the Implications for Social Activism, 2021
Rachel O’Dwyer, Tokens: The Future of Money in the Age of the Platform, 2023
Byung-Chul Han, The Crisis of Narration, 2024

Texts and Books on Design

Chris Lee, Immutable: Designing History, 2022
Mahmoud Keshavarz and Shahram Khosravi (eds.), Seeing Like A Smuggler: Borders from Below, 2022
Sasha Costanza-Chock, Design Justice: Community-Led Practices to Build the Worlds We Need. 2020
Tony Fry, Defuturing: A New Design Philosophy, 2020
Silvio Lorusso, Entreprecariat: Everyone is an Entrepreneur: Nobody is Safe, 2019
Arturo Escobar, Designs for the Pluriverse: Radical Interdependence, Autonomy, and the Making of Worlds, 2017
Beatriz Colomina and Mark Wigley, Are We human? Notes on an archeology of design, 2016
Marjanne van Helvert (ed.),The Responsible Object: A History of Design Ideology for the Future, 2016
Joanna Boehnert, ‘Design vs. the Design Industry’, Design Philosophy Papers, 12:2 pp.119-136, 2015
Tony Fry, Clive Dilnot and Susan C. Stewart, Design and the Question of History, 2015
Luiza Prado and Pedro Oliveira, Questioning the “critical” in Speculative & Critical Design, 2014
Lisa Gitelman, Paper Knowledge: Toward a Media History of Documents, 2014
Johanna Drucker, Graphesis: Visual Forms of Knowledge Production, 2014
Evgeny Morozov, To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism, 2013
Hito Steyerl,The Wretched of the Screen, 2012
Johanna Drucker,and Emily McVarish, Graphic Design History: A Critical Guide, 2009
Daniel van der Velden, ‘Research and Destroy’, Metropolis M no. 2, April/May 2006
James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition, 1998
Victor J. Papanek, Design for the Real World: Human Ecology and Social Change, 1972
John Berger, Ways of Seeing, 1972

Books on radical pedagogy

Precarious Workers Brigade, Training for Exploitation? Politicising Employability & Reclaiming Education, 2017
bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress, 1994
Ivan Illich, Deschooling Society, 1971
Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 1968
Francisco Ferrer, The Origins and Ideals of the Modern School, 1913

Texts and Books on Anarchism

Dan McQuillan, Resisting AI: An Anti-fascist Approach to Artifical Intelligence, 2023
Peter Gelderloos, The Solutions are already here: Strategies for Ecological Revolution from Below, 2022
David Graeber and David Wengrow, The Dawn of Everthing: A New History of Humanity, 2021
Dean Spade, Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During This Crisis (and the Next), 2020
Mark Bray, Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook, 2017
carla bergman and Nick Montgomery, Joyful Militancy: Building Thriving Resistance in Toxic Times, 2017
Noam Chomsky, On Anarchism, 2013
James C. Scott, Two Cheers for Anarchism: Six Easy Pieces on Autonomy, Dignity, and Meaningful Work and Play, 2012
Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed, 1974
Leo Tolstoy, On Anarchy, 1900
Peter Kropotkin, The Conquest of Bread, 1892

Open Source Tools

cryptpad.org
etherpad.org
meet.jit.si
riseup.net

Research Tools

Wikimedia Commons
Monoskop
The Anarchist Library
Library Genesis
Aaaaarg
Sci-Hub

Contact and CV

Email
Mastodon
Medium
Linktr.ee
Instagram
Download CV (PDF)

Typeface by Christina Janus and Desmond Wong