Notes on Notebooks is a research enquiry made visible. Navigating thoughts expressed by writers, artists, and academics, the A4 team critically examines how people use notebooks as a modality that offers a vital space for thinking and confessing.

These strands of exploration – from debated diary-keeping motivations to entomology sketching methodologies; from bookbinding experiments to architecture journals – are scrawled in chalk across a floor-to-ceiling blackboard, connoting the immediacy and impermanence of a thought. In this material choice associated with learning and teaching, the notebook is examined as an ‘open studio’ where ideas straddled the boundary of public vs private.

The research is purposed to inspire conversation around what it means to keep a notebook – with some of the research being harvested from anecdotes and discussions with colleagues and friends, as recent projects at A4 have circulated around books and book-making.