Artful infrastructuring in two cases of community PD

Abstract

In this paper, we use the notions of artful integrations and infrastructure to analyze two cases of community Participatory Design 'in the wild'. Though the communities are quite different on the outside, they bear surprising similarities when it comes to collaboration in technology design. We identify several features of how the community members artfully integrate their everyday materials, tools, methods and practices into collaborative processes of infrastructuring. The notions of 'artful integrations' and 'infrastructure' sensitize our analysis towards a more conceptual understanding on information system development as multi-relational: socio-material, socio-historical and processual. We conclude by suggesting some refinements to the notions in the context of community PD.

Infrastructure Time: Long-term Matters in Collaborative Development

“…(2002), prompted a stream of research (e.g. Karasti and Baker 2004;Karasti and Syrjänen 2004;Edwards et al 2007;Pipek and Wulf 2009;Baker and Millerand, forthcoming) investigating development processes in terms of 'infrastructuring'. Incremental, iterative processes, discerned as 'growing' over time, contribute to questioning whether infrastructures can be built at all in the traditional sense of technology development (cf.…”

“…Freeman 2007). Traditional measures of size in terms of numbers of participants and systems or of computational cycles and storage units are not taken as the most important denominator of infrastructures; rather infrastructural systems and their integration are the focus (Hanseth and Lundberg 2001;Karasti and Syrjänen 2004;Pipek and Wulf 2009). Some of these studies draw on previous research on continuing design in use (Henderson and Kyng 1991) and tailoring (Trigg and Bødker 1994), and later work on appropriation (Pipek 2005) with roots in the Participatory Design tradition where development is seen as taking place over time.…”

An Afterword to ‘Infrastructuring and Collaborative Design’

“…Across them, we see a confidence in identifying related sets of socio-technical developments as infrastructuring and applying to them a relatively stable set of theoretical resources. All articles make reference to the initial work by Star and colleagues on information infrastructures characterizing infrastructures as relational and situated (including Star and Ruhleder 1996;Neumann and Star 1996;Bowker and Star 1999) and most also to its 'how to infrastructure' variant that emphasizes the processual, in-the-making quality and perspective of 'infrastructuring' (Star and Bowker 2002;Karasti and Baker 2004;Karasti and Syrjänen 2004;Pipek and Wulf 2009;Karasti 2014). In addition, many articles in the collection integrate further theoretical notions and conceptual tools mainly from the fields of Science and Technology Studies (STS) and Information Systems (IS) into their analyses, including the 'biography of artifacts ' (Menéndez-Blanco et al 2017), 'commons' (Marttila and Botero 2017), 'inverse infrastructures' and 'research in the wild' (Crabu and Magaudda 2018), 'repair' (Mikaelsen et al 2018), 'publics' (Menéndez-Blanco et al 2017;Lindley et al 2017), and 'tensions' and 'imaginaries' (Kow and Lustig 2018), 'knotworks' (Bødker et al 2017) in particular comes from activity theory in the work of Yrjö Engeström.…”

Infrastructuring for Cultural Commons

“…Infrastructuring can be considered as a framework for thinking about design activities in more emergent terms (Karasti and Syrjänen 2004). This approach to design stresses that, instead of focusing solely on particular artefacts and neglecting the surroundings in which the artefacts are placed, it is specifically the surroundings that become of critical concern (Pipek and Syrjänen 2006;Pipek and Wulf 2009).…”

“…Accordingly, when doing infrastructuring, a lot of design work turns towards creating a continuous alignment between different communities and between ways of doing things (Björgvinsson et al 2010;2012a , b) while accounting for the creative 'design' activities of professional designers and users, without necessarily privileging either view (Karasti and Syrjänen 2004;Pipek and Syrjänen 2006). Empirical research on how infrastructures emerge through infrastructuring has pointed out that such continuousalignment processes are partly mediated by what is called gateways (Jackson et al 2007).…”