This is the first of a series of posts exploring systems in community print spaces. The rest (as they are posted) can be found here: (Systems from) Presses Kept Running.
TRAINING + COMPETENCY
Most spaces require some form of training in order for people to use the print tools—often this is media-specific (i.e. you must take the risograph training to use the risographs, but that won’t allow you to use the screen printing equipment).
Usually this is through the publicly accessible workshops (take a workshop first, then use the equipment on your own).
Many folks have two intro courses—one focused on making things with the riso (the “creative” class) and one where you focus on learning how to operate the riso, but do not make something of your own (the “functional” class). Separating them this way lets the latter class (which is the one usually requires to use the equipment) be more tactical, and not get bogged down in the art portion of things—while the creative class doesn’t have to get overwhelmed by talking about replacing ink tubes, or registration techniques, etc. and gives people space to play. I first heard about this in use at Paper Press Punch.
In a few spaces (including my own, formerly) this was through direct 1:1 or 2:1 trainings that were scheduled ad hoc.
I used to set up sessions with one or two people for ~90 minutes, and ask them to bring in something they had made for us to do workflow + process experiments on. Then we would go through prepress on something of theirs, helping to show how their working process might be adapted for riso, using the tools they already had. A few test sheets would be printed and I’d leave them with the instruction: “sit with this, and if you come up with a project where riso makes sense, please reach back out.” The printshop paid me a flat rate for this labor and covered materials.
Doing the “follow-up project” after that session was also a prerequisite to becoming a member in the space in my studio because:
It gave me and the rest of the printshop members a chance to see how someone used the space and if we wanted to extend a membership to them (at the time we were dealing with limited slots and storage options, so there was always guest access, but 24/7 membership was just 5–10 of us).
It gave them a sense of the actual limitations of these machines and our space, to make sure they knew what they were getting into and that our resources would work for their projects.
Outlet PDX has just announced official one-on-one workshops on a by appointment basis! “These private workshops are 2 hours long and for a maximum of 2 people. You will be working with one of our experienced studio assistants as they guide you through the process of riso printing. Following this workshop you can sign up to print with us during our open print hours. Because riso costs vary greatly depending on what you’re printing, the workshop fee covers the class—you pay for whatever printing you end up doing at the end of your session.”
Generally there is an informal opt-out for people who already have riso experience or are printing elsewhere.
At bearbear a few years ago (at the beginning of their time in The Bindery), this opt-out was formalized—there were three ways to get access: taking the 3hr intro workshop, taking a 1hr refresher (if you had past experiences but haven’t been working in a while), or “testing out” with a .5hr functional eval, where you demonstrate proper use.
In my space we said: “if you have done the training session here, or any of these other ones [list of other places locally that offered intros], you can use our equipment if you schedule an appointment with artists here.”
ACCESS MODELS (MEMBERSHIP + OTHERS)
Who has access to the machines, and what do they pay or trade for that access? A few common patterns have shown up:
In a membership model people are paying a monthly or weekly amount to have regular access to the space. Sometimes there are “tiers” to this access, with people who are paying more having more access (either in equipment, workspace, storage, or time).
Two common tiers are “open hours” (access during a set period of staffed open hours) and “keyholder” (24/7 access).
The Soapbox has a really useful pattern of describing their tiers based on the kind of use they tend to result in (sort of a “here’s the type of artist that gets the most out of this type of membership”).
A number of places use an a-la-cart membership: a base membership that has various add-ons.
Here are some of the add-ons at
(I have misplaced the record of which studio uses these, I want to say it was The Bindery, though it looks like their model has changed since then):+ 24/7 access
+ storage locker/cubby
+ flatfile
+ risographs
+ bindery equipment
There is often work-for-trade access to membership, either with a specific “volunteer” level or a certain amount of labor expected in exchange for a discount or full membership.
At Tiny Splendor / Max’s Garage there’s a limited number of 21 “monitor” positions, who staff the shop in 3 hour shifts in exchange for their membership. This allows the studio to be open 9 hours a day, 7 days a week.
The Soapbox has two payment points for each of their memberships, one for working members (who volunteer ~12 hours annually in the printshop) and one for non-working members.
Memberships sometimes last longer than a month too, with people committing to a quarter, half, or full year and paying up front. This can be done as a discounted rate or as a means of facilitating certain kinds of limited access (i.e. one 3 month rotating “shop assistant” position).
In a rental model people are paying for time on the machines, either by hour, day, or multi-day blocks. Sometimes there’s a “punch card” system where you buy a number of uses at once. Facilitating this generally requires some sort of “clock-in clock-out” mechanism, or scheduling on a shared calendar.
Pickwick Independent Press does a work-for-trade thing here too, with volunteer work covering a small set of one-day sessions. (They also do something interesting to incentivize blocks—after the prepaid sessions, additional sessions can be scheduled for a slight upcharge from what they cost at the prepaid cost.)
In a collective model a group of artists share the operating expenses of a space, each having full access to that space and making decisions together on its structure and policies. As the group changes in shape and number, and the studio resources and expenses shift, the amount people pay to maintain the shop is also changing.
I think of two presses as having really good collective models (or policies that help them to operate in more of a collective way): Press Press in Baltimore + LA and Footprint Workers Co-op in the UK. I highly recommend a lot of the organizing resources Press Press has published, especially their two dialogue based zines a tender talk: tender structures for collaborative work and Toolkit for Cooperative, Collective, & Collaborative Cultural Work.
They are rare, given the limited resources in a lot of the small press world, but there are also free models, where during a set period of time people have free access to the machines (though they are often still paying for materials and need previous training). A lot of studios refer to this as “open hours,” and have limited time slots for this sort of community printing. Part of the difficulty here though is that open hours like this definitely need to be monitored, and without paying for time, the funds to pay someone to monitor the studio have to come from elsewhere (maybe material markups, maybe donations, maybe somewhere else).
Paper Press Punch used to run an open hours system where people would pay $15 to reserve a time slot—but these funds would then go towards their material costs for the session. That way there was an incentive not to miss the appointment, and the studio was able to bring some money in to pay for the time needed to set up the studio even if they no-showed.
And I suppose I have not seen it clearly, but another pattern I know of abstractly is the patronage model, in which the relationship between the labor in the space and the cost of running it is more abstract, because most of the funding is donation-based.
MISCELLANEOUS NOTES
Unsorted extra notes on access:
How is time choreographed? Different forms of scheduling—shared calendars many places, at Tiny Splendor you text the monitor on staff at the time and they let you in.
Whole side conversation on membership costs—I’ve noticed two points on a spectrum: (1) a space shared by a small group, maybe 2–10 artists, who are in there all the time and are paying a rent that’s generally between 25% and 50% of what they pay housing; (2) a large space with 100+ members, most of whom are only in once a month or less, and are each paying generally less than $50 a month.
I didn’t include print-for-hire as one of the access modes because I’m focusing on community print spaces, but that isn’t to say that print for hire shops aren’t providing a huge amount of community support. Whether it’s workshops, artist outreach, organizing fairs, or just publishing the work of artists—print-for-hire places are very much in the ecosystem of community work.
And that’s all for this one—next up is “Materials, Inventory, and Rates,” all about how we are tracking and charging for the various expenses incurred while running risographs.