From Rules in Use to Culture in Use – Commoning and Infrastructuring Practices in an Open Cultural Movement

Abstract

This paper explores how design and commoning practices can contribute to sustaining open cultural commons and guarding against enclosure. Based on a long-term engagement with a cultural movement, the author examines how design activities can strengthen interaction and participation in commons-like frameworks, and describes commoning and instrastructuring practices that can support commons culture. By critically reflecting on the development of a local Finnish chapter of the OpenGLAM (Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums) movement, the paper contributes to the ongoing discussion of design as infrastructuring in complex and open-ended socio-technical settings.

Framing collaborative processes of digital transformation in cultural organisations: from literary archives to augmented reality

“…The recent 'turn to openness' in cultural heritage institutions is oriented towards the development of collective design activities to support practices of 'commoning', especially in relation to increasing access and use of digitised cultural content (Marttila, 2016). The concept of meta-design, advanced by Fischer et al (2004) is also relevant to our investigation insofar it challenges the role of end-users in the design process, by concentrating on the creation of design templates for others to use.…”

Abelhas, drones e outras Coisas no espaço público: fazendo estratégias na cidade

“…Sometimes, multiple takes and viewpoints on the same matter of concern can lead to a situation where caring for one viewpoint can cause harm in another context. Therefore, developing a shared and common culture-in-use is a key part of successful self-driven initiatives and commons-like frameworks (Marttila, 2016). This is also an urgent quest for participatory designers to put more attention on how they contribute to and nurture commons culture (Pór, 2012), and identify how ongoing strategies, practices and city-making experiences in people's everyday lives could be translated into design language or into other needed vocabularies.…”

Relationality, commoning, and designing

“…In contemporary design research, and especially in the field of Participatory Design, commoning has been used as an invitation to rethink the roles of actors or entities in commons arrangements [19,23]; as a frame to discuss intertwined practices [17,27]; and as a tool for strategizing and locating socio-material practices as a part of city-making and urban commons [18,24], the strengthening of local democracy [14], and online collaboration and documentation practices of commons-oriented groups [7,15,30]. Moreover, the political dimensions of working for and with commons have been highlighted in Participatory Design [26].…”

“…The session 'The Politics of Commoning and Designing' at the Design Research Society conference 2016 [29] shed light on tensions and potentialities around commoning in design. The session employed the commoning concept to discuss, among other things, how design can aid the creation of spaces that facilitate commoning processes [2], and the commoning practices existing in a value-driven cultural movement against commodification of cultural commons [17]. More specifically, this workshop proposal lays its foundations on the following two experiences.…”