Infrastructuring for Cultural Commons

Abstract

Abstract. In this paper we reflect on our involvement in the design and development of two information systems: Fusion and EUscreen. Both are infrastructural initiatives aimed at contributing, from different angles, to wider public access to and appropriation of the European digital cultural heritage. Our analysis is founded on the notions of an installed base and gateway in information infrastructure development. We situate our co-design activities and infrastructuring strategies in relation to a broader interest in advocating not only the preservation of and access to digital cultural heritage, but, more importantly, enabling collaboration, to support the emerging practices of diverse user groups, and to contribute to cultural commons.

An Afterword to ‘Infrastructuring and Collaborative Design’

“…In addition to ethnographic (Ulriksen et al 2017;Parmiggiani 2017;Kow and Lustig 2018), qualitative multimethod (Crabu and Magaudda 2018), and qualitative interpretive approaches (Grisot and Vassilakopoulou 2017;Mikaelsen et al 2018), the assortment includes approaches with different degrees of researcher engagement with the design projects studied (Bødker et al 2017;Lindley et al 2017;Young and Lutters 2017;Marttila and Botero 2017). Furthermore, one study reports of integrating an ethnographic approach with involvement in design during the project (Young and Lutters 2017).…”

“…The twelve articles published in this special issue, while all viewing their material through the lens of infrastructuring and collaborative design, have covered a range of substantive fields/domains, including information infrastructure development for healthcare and welfare (Grisot and Vassilakopoulou 2017;Ulriksen et al 2017;Mikaelsen et al 2018), infrastructuring for cultural commons in digital cultural heritage (Marttila and Botero 2017), formation of 'publics' around the theme of dyslexia (Menéndez-Blanco et al 2017), voting technology deployment in digital civics (Lindley et al 2017), infrastructure development for a new cross-disciplinary synthetic science field of Land System Science (Young and Lutters 2017), infrastructuring in an oil company (Parmiggiani 2017); infrastructuring in education (Bødker et al 2017), grassroots infrastructure development for wireless community network (Crabu and Magaudda 2018), and infrastructuring an open source digital currency and payment platform, Bitcoin (Kow and Lustig 2018), and last, in a somewhat different vein, discussing how to study information infrastructure as an empirical real-world phenomenon of infrastructuring (Karasti and Blomberg 2018). …”

“…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.…”

“…As a counterbalancing initiative, they experimented with on-location voting machines as mechanisms to materialize the infrastructuring effort at relevant places, making space itself a foundation for material participation that may help keeping stakeholders involved. Marttila and Botero (2017) develop a different approach to connect the various stakeholders that need to participate in a process of creating cultural commons, freely available materials that document and potentially transfer historical and/or ongoing cultural practices. In a reflection on experiences from two European research projects they describe the use of two transitory concepts as tools for collaboration in design.…”

“…The concept of gateways (coined by Edwards et al 2007) refers to assemblages and technologies that allow linking and bridging otherwise incompatible or disparate socio-technical infrastructures and practices. Gateways have been used as an analytical term, but Marttila and Botero (2017) document experiences of using the concept to identify sites and contexts of an infrastructuring effort (organizations, places, technologies) that are particularly appropriate to let in-between infrastructures demonstrate their mediation powers between until then separate fields of practice. While they nicely demonstrate the issues and concerns of this approach in the field of cultural heritage, the approach as such may serve as a targeted infrastructuring strategy to be initiated by stakeholders who aim to reach out to other relevant fields of practice.…”