Designing for 'infrastructuring'

Reference: Agid, S. (2018). ‘Dismantle, change, build’: Designing abolition at the intersections of local, large-scale, and imagined infrastructures. Design Studies, 59, 95-116. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1016/j.destud.2018.05.006

Abstract: As a theory and practice within the field of participatory design, infrastructuring holds complex intersections between people, groups, technologies, systems, and ideologies in view. Building on other researchers in participatory design, this article argues for an approach to infrastructuring that focuses on how we do, and create capacity to do, the work of infrastructuring locally with people and groups affected by and working in relation to the systems we seek to engage. These dynamics are explored in the literature and through a case story of an embedded design engagement with a social justice organization, where our focus and the relational practices we designed through long-term work together were shaped by the intersections of local, large-scale, and imagined infrastructures central to their organizing work.

My notes: Disclaimer, I know Shana personally and have learned about their work through personal conversations, still this paper blew my mind as I finally read it carefully in 2020, as it seems more relevant today than two years ago, or twenty as it feels now. Based on a project with a group that seeks to "make policing obsolete", Shana continues their previous work examining how designers 'infrastructure' (as a verb) in participatory projects. This is very welcome in PD where often papers (imho) merely report well-intended experiences done in/with communities. Shana's paper is refreshingly accessible for outsiders (like me) to grasp these ideas of 'designing for infrastructuring' where deep ideas are not always clearly articulated in the literature -it doesn't help that both of these terms are nouns and verbs and that people seem to enjoy applying new terms to very, very different things. Yes, Thomas Kuhn, I'm looking at your thirty uses of 'paradigm' here. At five pages long, the introductory section serves well as a literature review on 'infrastructuring' for the uninitiated. 

Section 2 describes the case study where Shana uses the expression 'design of local infrastructures' to refer to the design of things like 'an internal campaign proposal graphic' and 'a system for first collecting stories'. Shana then focuses on a wall-chart they co-designed with the group in a process they relate to ‘participatory knowledge-building’ as a way that 'exceeds a primarily instrumental notion of participants’ contributions, and emphasizes the dynamic production of, and struggle for, knowledge as part of political engagement in (re)making the world they are researching' (p. 108). 

Being 600% honest, I feel that in the design research community, the design of a checklist and a wall chart can seem at first exaggerated to analyse as 'infrastructuring', but one way I (think that I) understand this comes from my experiences with groups where a name for a project is being decided collectively: sometimes these discussions have taken extremely deep and rich turns where members of the team suggest names and slogans that help everyone understand where others are coming from and how they actually see the work and the goals, even the worldviews of others. 'Naming the baby' in those occasions has ended up being one of the most important planning stages, as the name becomes the 'piñata' that is collectively assembled and filled with everyone's ideas, and then the lolly scramble reveals deep assumptions, agendas, identities, and relationships. If I'm correct, such 'transition points' as Shana calls them can be designed and thus it follows that designers could (should?) be educated to be experts in facilitating transition points in collective projects (participatory, n-disciplinary, etc). I am both excited to think and work on that premise, but also remain sceptical that transitions can be 'designed' at least in the conventional use of the word by designers. I think, for example, of the years that passed from the creation of "Black Lives Matter" by Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi in 2013 to its general acceptance and embracing by the general population in 2020. Would design interventions shorten such 'natural diffusion times'? Designing in such contexts implies a degree of control and top-down decision-making that may not be desirable or possible. I'm sure that Shana has a lot to say about this and I look forward to learning from their wisdom soon.