Tying Knots: Participatory Infrastructuring at Work

Abstract

Today, most design projects are infrastructuring projects, because they build on technologies, competencies and practices that already exist. While infrastructuring was originally seen as being full of conflicts and contradictions with what is already present, we find that many contemporary reports seem to mainly address participatory infrastructuring as horizontal co-design and local, mutual learning processes in which people attempt to make the most out of available technology.In this paper we expand our view of design activities in three dimensions: First, how participatory processes play out vertically in different political and practical arenas; second, on the back stage of design, the messy activities that occur before, between and after the participatory workshops. And third, on their reach; how they tie into existing networks across organizations, and how agency and initiatives become dispersed within these networks.To illustrate and discuss the process of participatory infrastructuring we use a case study from an educational context. This particular project contains a diverse set of design activities at many organizational levels revolving around technology, decisionmaking, competence-building, commitment and policy-making. The project highlights these complexities, and our discussions lead to a vocabulary for participatory infrastructuring that focuses on knotworking, rather than structure, and on both horizontal and vertical reach and sustainability. This vocabulary is grounded in the meeting of the literature on infrastructuring, participatory design, and activity theory, and leads to a revised understanding of, for example, learning and conflicts in participatory infrastructuring. AbstractToday, most design projects are infrastructuring projects, because they build on technologies, competencies and practices that already exist. While infrastructuring was originally seen as being full of conflicts and contradictions with what is already present, we find that many contemporary reports seem to mainly address participatory infrastructuring as horizontal co-design and local, mutual learning processes in which people attempt to make the most out of available technology.In this paper we expand our view of design activities in three dimensions: First, how participatory processes play out vertically in different political and practical arenas; second, on the back stage of design, the messy activities that occur before, between and after the participatory workshops. And third, on their reach; how they tie into existing networks across organizations, and how agency and initiatives become dispersed within these networks.To illustrate and discuss the process of participatory infrastructuring we use a case study from an educational context. This particular project contains a diverse set of design activities at many organizational levels revolving around technology, decision-making, competence-building, commitment and policy-making. The project highlights these complexities, and our discussions lead to a vocabulary...

An Afterword to ‘Infrastructuring and Collaborative Design’

“…The articles that build on empirical work, employ a variety of research methodological approaches, ranging from no research method described but a case study used to illustrate the chosen conceptual framing and argument (Bødker et al 2017) to detailing multi-method approaches (Mikaelsen et al 2018;Menéndez-Blanco et al 2017;Crabu and Magaudda 2018;Ulriksen et al 2017;Grisot and Vassilakopoulou 2017;Young and Lutters 2017;Lindley et al 2017). 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).…”

“…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.…”

Surfacing the arctic

“…We therefore follow the invitation to foreground the relational nature of infrastructuring in PD [19,20] by proposing to go back to the roots of the field [21], as a way to problematize the consequences of digital technologies in the politics of design: who are the users and the stakeholders when 'work' is done by sensors, algorithms, and data? Who is participating?…”