Bottom-up Infrastructures: Aligning Politics and Technology in building a Wireless Community Network

Contemporary innovation in infrastructures is increasingly characterized by a close relationship between experts and lay people. This phenomenon has attracted the attention from a wide range of disciplines, including computer-supported cooperative work (CSCW), science and technology studies (S&TS), organization studies and participatory design (PD). Connecting to this broad area of research, the article presents a qualitative case study concerning the building and maintenance of a grassroots, bottom-up information infrastructure in Italy, defined as wireless community network (WCN). Methodologically, the research is based on qualitative interviews with participants to the WCN, ethnographic observations and document analysis. The aim of the article is to understand the alignment between the technical work implied in building this bottom-up infrastructure and the political and cultural frameworks that move people to participate to this project. Relying on the field of science & technology studies, and in particular on the notions of ‘inverse infrastructure’ and ‘research in the wild’, we disclose the WCN’s peculiar innovation trajectory, localized outside conventional spaces of research and development. Overall, the presentation of the qualitative and ethnographic data allows to point out a more general reflection on bottom-up infrastructures and to enrich the academic debate concerning bottom-up infrastructuring work and other similar typologies of collaborative design projects in the domain of infrastructures

Infrastructuring for cultural commons

In this doctoral dissertation, I inquire into the ways in which Participatory Design (PD) and digital design endeavors can contribute to wider public access to, and use of, digital cultural heritage. I advocate for an approach according to which digital cultural heritage is arranged and understood as cultural commons, and for more collaborative modes of social care for and governance of the commons. In addition to the empirically grounded findings and proposals contained in six individual research articles, I develop a theoretical framework that combines scholarship on Information Infrastructures, Commons and PD. Against this framework I interrogate how the information infrastructures and conditions that surround digital cultural heritage can be active in constructing and contributing to cultural commons. While doing this, I draw attention to the gap that exists between on the one hand official institutional digital cultural heritage collections, systems and practices, and on the other hand the digital platforms and practices through which everyday people create, curate and share digital cultural works. In order to understand how to critically and productively bridge this gap, I present insights gained from conducting three design research cases that engage both cultural heritage institutions and everyday media users. Building upon this empirical work, and latching on to scholarship on the notion of infrastructuring, I propose four infrastructuring strategies for cultural commons: probing and building upon the installed base, stimulating and simulating design and use through gateways, producing and pooling shared resources, and, lastly, fostering and shaping a commons culture that supports commoning. In exploring these strategies, I map the territory between commons and infrastructuring, and connect these notions to the PD tradition. I do so to sketch the design principles for a design orientation, commons design. I assert that these principles can be useful for advancing PD, and can inform future initiatives, aid in identifying infrastructural challenges, and in finding and confirming an orientation to participatory design activities. Drawing on my practical design work, I discuss requirements for professional designers operating on commons frameworks and with collective action. By doing this, my dissertation not only breaks new theoretical ground through advancing theoretical considerations relevant to contemporary design research, especially the field of PD, but also contributes practical implications useful for professional digital media design practice, especially for designers working in the fields of digital culture and cultural heritage

When skillful participation becomes design : making clothes together

This dissertation investigates the intersection and fluidity of design, use and participation when participatory design (PD) extends its focus to new forms, spaces and community contexts. Whereas early PD aimed to enable user participation in the design of their workplaces, contemporary PD experiences new challenges by expanding to new contexts. These contexts are, for instance, “makerspaces” for “peer production”, dedicated to placing participants with varying knowledge and skill into dialogue while providing spaces, tools, materials, and guidance. When extending PD to such spaces, the roles of the designer/user become blurred, because over time they move along a spectrum of acts of design and use. I investigated this challenge by creating three exemplary sites for designing and making clothes together. By designing together I refer to enabling the garment user to participate in the design and production process through offering local spaces and means for shared making activities. I blend PD, do-it-yourself, and do-it-together activities with concepts from peer production, to explore how participants (designer and user) with different skills are “making clothes together”. Simultaneously, I sensitize the participants to sustainable alternatives to the global mass-production system in fashion, which is traditionally based on fast, cheap and high-volume production in low-labor-cost countries. I carried out three “research through design” experiments, creating different kinds of peer production makerspace settings in Finland, Germany and Italy. These spaces were distinctive in the social diversity of their participants; themes and engagement methods, and in their focus on clothing. This focus offered the participants a familiar repertoire of technical equipment (e.g. household sewing machines) and was thus beneficial for observing the blurring of roles between designer and user. Each experiment consisted of a series of participatory making workshops, each lasting three to six hours. During a total of about 60 workshops with hundreds of participants, I collected rich materials such as design diary notes, observations, photographs, and audio recordings of qualitative interviews. The experiments posed specific questions that led me to emergent conceptualizations of “stuff” (i.e. tools, materials, spaces) and “skills”. These stuff and skills were analyzed in terms of their evolving interdependence and their relation to participation and the blurring of roles. The dissertation is structured as the presentation of the main findings of four peer-reviewed journal articles and an introductory chapter. I outline five main contributions to extended PD research and practice. First, my research illustrated the fluid spectrum that spans design and use, through interrelating conceptions from literature with a substantial amount of materials documented through practice. Second, through systematic analysis of stuff and skills, the research explored the social and material considerations of design and “infrastructuring”. Third, I documented how the participants’ (designer and user) roles changed and how participation is a development process over time. The participants’ roles changed from categories such as beginner to advanced experts and allowed associations between those with different kinds of material engagements from operating to managing to designing. This was seen, for instance, by participants taking over responsibilities and becoming workshop facilitators; or a local visitor who turned out to be a sewing machine repair expert. Fourth, I propose that in the given context, participation can be understood as skillful acts of use. This perspective helped me recognize and document changes in the participants’ roles and types of participation when framed as acts of use, determined by skills. Finally, the developed categories documented the relation between participation and skill, by highlighting interesting dynamics emerging around skills development, materialized through evolving and changing stuff (i.e. social and material infrastructuring). For example, skilled participants developed or brought their own tools for facilitation. This further elucidated how skills are not static but interrelated, and that specific skills are required and can be developed through different social, material and designerly aspects, attuned to such extended PD contexts. The results, therefore, contribute to extended PD research by adding nuances extracted from practice, to highlight how skillful participation changes over time. This suggests a reconceptualization and broadening of traditional PD or co-design perspectives of roles. For practice, the perspective of framing participation as skillful acts of use allows designers to support participants’ skills (development) during participation. Further, my research identified that a focus on user or designer roles is limiting in such contexts. It advocates designing spaces for infrastructuring, which allow changes in participation and anticipate unexpected use: spaces that nourish skills development and encourage the sharing of responsibilities among very different participants which can potentially be sustained over time

Co-creative partnerships as catalysts for social change

Mundane cities are challenged to design for unpredictable and rapidly changing futures. In the current work, we refer to thesechallenges as a collaborative design challenge and explore how co-creative partnerships can enable a participatory turn by establishinga new social infrastructure. The corresponding citizen-centred design approach offers a variety of design opportunitiesto engage with citizens, to empower all involvement, and enabling a social fabric to be increasingly reflexive and responsive.Through the illustration of three collaborative design studies in the public realm, we explore how design can act as a strategytowards a transforming society. It shows that participatory designing enabled empowerment across the co-creative partnership,though it also calls for strategic guidance in order to sustain transformational change. We end with an elaborate discussion onthe role of strategic design in facilitating the interplay among new coalitions of city makers towards a transforming society thatembraces sustainable social innovation. It can be concluded that co-creative partnerships can act as network designers, capacitybuilders, and enablers of transformational change, and have the potential to act as change makers, driving sustainable socialinnovation.Keywords: co-creative partnerships, diffuse design, participation, social innovation, transitions

DIY networking as a facilitator for interdisciplinary research on the hybrid city

DIY networking is a technology with special characteristics compared to the public Internet, which holds a unique potential for empowering citizens to shape their hybrid urban space toward conviviality and collective awareness. It can also play the role of a “boundary object” for facilitating interdisciplinary interactions and participatory processes between different actors: researchers, engineers, practitioners, artists, designers, local authorities, and activists. This position paper presents a social learning framework, the DIY networking paradigm, that we aim to put in the centre of the hybrid space design process. We first introduce our individual views on the role of design as discussed in the fields of engineering, urban planning, urban interaction design, design research, and community informatics. We then introduce a simple methodology for combining these diverse perspectives into a meaningful interdisciplinary collaboration, through a series of related events with different structure and framing. We conclude with a short summary of a selection of these events, which serves also as an introduction to the CONTACT workshop on facilitating information sharing between strangers, in the context of the Hybrid City III conference

Designing commoning: uma investigação em design sobre desafios da construção de colaborações sustentáveis para transições urbanas

Design enables collaboration through co-creation techniques, which can allow multiple stakeholders to participate in the design process with the aim to suggest suitable solutions for specific problems. In the context of urban communities, this process entails challenges with respect to the power dynamics that constitute both community and design practices. In this sense, this thesis is located in the domain of design research for studies, aiming to understand how collaboration can emerge from community dynamics and how design practices can facilitate processes of building of collaborations, ensuring its sustainability over time towards novel transitions. This research has been conducted by investigating emerging design agencies carried out by urban “commoning” practices, when collaboration is built from both “community” and “project” orientations. Thus, this thesis explores different configurations of design agency produced by the interaction between designers and nondesigners through a qualitative analysis of four particular case studies located in Brazil and Portugal: A Batata Precisa de Você (São Paulo city); Casa do Vapor (Almada city); Acupuntura Urbana (São Paulo city); and VivaCidade (Aveiro city). These projects took efforts to promote participatory dynamics through design activities such as the co-production of events, objects and spaces. This thesis generated a comprehensive map of emerging design agency configurations placed in spaces of intersection between top-down and bottomup social forms of community building that might promote more sustainable collaborations in public spaces. Therefore, this thesis offers contributions related to both improving user participation in urban environments in the decision-making process and designing collaboration for commoning practices for sustainable transitions. First, this research suggests that the creation of collaborative processes for the development of horizontal decision-making systems require continuous negotiations including conflicts, dissensus and different power interests that comprise a collective action. Second, the empirical analysis carried out by this study suggests that design agency in communities might create conditions through flexible design programs in order to emerge diverse agencies that constitute a certain urban community, allowing ways to rise issues handled by the community itself. Third, this investigation suggests that collaboration can be questioned and explored by design research and design practice through processes of performing, disrupting and sustaining participation for catalysing continuous processes of local change. This research also calls the attention of urban actors for the constitution of design agency through the interplay between making, negotiating and belonging the participation process into collective actions for the formation of sustainable collaborations. Therefore, this thesis is divided in four major parts. The first part presents the theoretical background and the argument of the research project, including a compilation of concepts and ideas developed by the transdisciplinary field of common theory and design research approaches associated with the domains of prototyping, infrastructuring and articulating communities. The second part describes the methodological approach by using gathering and analysing methods from the research field of social sciences, such as the qualitative interviews and coding process. The third part presents and discusses a set of case studies of creative participatory projects carried out in public spaces, which gave support to the elaboration of the structured analysis of the four case studies. Finally, the fourth part of this research project presents the overall outcomes of this thesis on its contribution to the field of design research and design practice, pointing out both the main conclusions and implications of this work in addressing how design research and design practice might shift their approaches to acknowledge the complexity of designing participation in urban spaces.O design permite a colaboração por meio de técnicas de co-criação, as quais facilitam a participação de todos no processo de design com o objetivo de sugerir soluções adequadas para problemas específicos. No contexto de dinâmicas comunitárias, este processo implica desafios em relação às dinâmicas de poder que constituem tanto a comunidade como a própria prática de design. Neste sentido, esta tese está localizada no domínio da pesquisa de design para estudos, visando compreender como a colaboração pode emergir nas dinâmicas comunitárias e como as práticas de design podem facilitar processos de construção de colaborações, garantindo sua sustentabilidade ao longo do tempo para gerar novas mudanças. Assim, esta pesquisa explora novas agências de design produzidas por práticas urbanas de cooperação (commoning), em que a colaboração é construída a partir de duas perspectivas: “comunidade” e “projeto”. Assim, esta tese explora diferentes configurações de agência de design produzidas através da interação entre designers e não-designers através de uma análise qualitativa de quatro estudos de caso específicos localizados no Brasil e em Portugal: A Batata Precisa de Você (São Paulo); Casa do Vapor (Almada); Acupuntura Urbana (São Paulo); e VivaCidade (Aveiro). Esses projetos se esforçaram para promover dinâmicas participativas por meio da co-produção de eventos, objetos e espaços em diferentes contextos urbanos. Esta tese gerou um mapa analítico de novas configurações de agência de design localizadas em espaços de interseção entre formas de construção de comunidades “de cima para baixo” e “de baixo para cima”, as quais podem promover colaborações mais sustentáveis em espaços públicos. Portanto, esta tese oferece contribuições para melhoria da participação urbana em processos de decisão, como também a melhoria de práticas de design para a construção de colaboração que gerem transições sustentáveis nos espaços urbanos. Primeiro, esta pesquisa sugere que a criação de processos colaborativos para o desenvolvimento de sistemas mais horizontais de tomada de decisão requer negociações contínuas, incluindo conflitos, dissensos e os diferentes interesses de poder que compõem uma ação coletiva. Em segundo lugar, a análise empírica realizada por esta investigação sugere que a ação do design em comunidades pode criar condições através de programas flexíveis que permitam emergir diversas agências que constituem cada comunidade urbana, permitindo que os problemas e soluções sejam gerenciados pela própria comunidade. Em terceiro lugar, esta investigação sugere que a colaboração pode ser questionada e explorada pela pesquisa e prática de design por meio de processos de performance, interrupção e sustentação da participação com a intenção de catalisar processos contínuos de mudança local. Esta pesquisa também chama a atenção dos atores urbanos para a constituição da agência de design por meio da produção, negociação e pertencimento do processo local de participação, viabilizando colaborações sustentáveis. Portanto, esta tese é dividida em quatro partes principais. A primeira parte apresenta a fundamentação teórica e o argumento desta investigação a partir da compilação de conceitos e ideias desenvolvidos pelo campo transdisciplinar de “common” e abordagens dentro da pesquisa em design associados a prototipagem, infrastructuring e articulação de comunidades. A segunda parte descreve a abordagem metodológica usando métodos de coleta e análise de informações do trabalho de campo provindas das Ciências Sociais, tais como entrevista qualitativa e codificação. A terceira parte deste documento apresenta e interpreta um conjunto de estudos de caso de projetos participativos realizados em espaços públicos, os quais deram suporte à elaboração de uma análise estruturada de quatro estudos de caso principais. Finalmente, a quarta parte desta tese apresenta as contribuições deste trabalho para o campo da pesquisa em design e para a prática de design, chamando a atenção para a necessidade de produzir novas abordagens em design que possam incorporar a complexidade de projetar a participação em espaços urbanos.Programa Doutoral em Desig

Re-Infrastructuring for eHealth: Dealing with Turns in Infrastructure Development

acceptedVersionpublishedVersionNivå