Infrastructuring in Participatory Design Helena Karasti

University of Oulu, Finland; Luleå University of Technology, Sweden helena.karasti@oulu.fi / ltu.se

ABSTRACT This paper reviews literature and reflects on infrastructur-ing in Participatory Design (PD) with a conceptual inter-est. It starts with the notion of information infrastructure introduced to the PD community in the mid-1990s by Star and collaborators. It traces how the notion has been adapted, appended, and negotiated within a number of PD approaches known as “infrastructuring.” Based on this review, the paper discusses a number of themes arising from these approaches that relate to salient information infrastructure characteristics and speak to the specificity of infrastructuring in PD. This paper takes stock of what has happened in conceptual terms with regard to infor-mation infrastructure and infrastructuring in the field of PD to inform continuing work.

Author Keywords Participatory Design, infrastructuring, information infra-structure, conceptual analysis, science and technology studies

ACM Classification Keywords H5.m. Information interfaces and presentation (e.g., HCI): Miscellaneous.

INTRODUCTION The world is becoming increasingly connected via net-worked digital technologies. We are challenged to study and design for “the new frontier” of complex phenomena, a challenge which is also reflected in the theme “Reflect-ing Connectedness” of the 2014 Participatory Design Conference. This paper addresses the challenge by ex-ploring “infrastructuring” in PD. The notion of information infrastructure is one possibility for conceptualizing the new kinds of social, material, technical, and political changes and formations taking place in our societies. Typical metaphors for infrastruc-tures comprise ensembles of things (e.g., pipes, wires, and servers) that connect or transport people, fluids, sig-nals, etc., in the background, and which are taken for granted. In relation to digitalized infrastructures, the term is also used for constellations of technologies and systems typically associated with the Internet. Unlike electricity or water, information infrastructures are simultaneously technical and semantic; bits of data are not simply undif-ferentiated matter transported over the network. Moreo-ver, information infrastructures allow people who are unrelated to their formation and operation to create new content and applications without additional assistance from the system's original designers. This quality is called

generativity. Neumann and Star introduced the socio-technical notion of information infrastructure to the PD community in 1996 (Neumann & Star, 1996). It took eight years before the follow-up article, “Artful Infrastructuring,” by Karasti and Syrjänen (2004) appeared, and several more years for other PD researchers to adopt the notion (starting with Ehn, 2008). Today, infrastructuring is an increasingly active area in PD research. The aim of this paper is to analyze and reflect on the lit-erature on information infrastructure and infrastructuring in the field of PD with a broad conceptual interest. The following questions will be explored: What has happened with the notion of information infrastructure? How was the notion morphed into infrastructuring? What further developments have taken place with the notion of infra-structuring? What additional concepts are incorporated? How do the infrastructuring approaches align with and negotiate the notion of information infrastructure? What information infrastructure themes are pertinent and rele-vant for infrastructuring in PD? How do the approaches concur and differ in relation to these themes? The article begins by going to the roots of the information infrastructure notion in PD. Then, it reviews existing work on the topic in PD and moves on to discuss themes arising from this literature. To conclude, some reflections are put forward on the current state and future prospects for infrastructuring in PD.

INFORMATION INFRASTRUCTURE In the article that introduced the notion of information infrastructure to the PD community, Neumann and Star (1996) reported on an infrastructural project in which they, as social scientists, participated in co-developing a large digital library system. They applied PD principles and drew on Science and Technology Studies (STS). STS is an interdisciplinary field of research aimed at under-standing and influencing how society shapes science and technology and how science and technology, in turn, shape society. More specifically, Neumann and Star uti-lized the notion of information infrastructure as proposed by Star and Ruhleder (1994, 1996). The STS tradition has a long history of socio-historical investigations of infrastructures, including road and rail-way systems, electricity grids, and telecommunications networks, and it offers conceptual frameworks for analyz-ing Large Technical Systems (LTS). Star and Ruhleder (1994, 1996) drew on the historic-socio-technical under-standing of infrastructures in LTS research and selective-ly merged this with their own understanding of infrastruc-tures as relational, practical, and situated. Their notion

This is author’s final version of the article.

emphasized socio-technical relations in the sense that information infrastructure should always be seen as a relationship between humans’ organized ways of “doing” things and the technologies that enable and support these methods. Instead of the systemic, evolutionary phase models of the LTS, Neumann and Star (1996) emphasized the contextu-al nature involved in the situated practical work of de-signing and using infrastructures. Within this framework, they bring to the foreground information infrastructure “from substrate to substance” and make visible and wor-thy of investigation what typically remains invisible and unnoticed in the background (Star, 1999). This requires “going backstage” (Star, 1999), studying infrastructure building “in the making” (Star & Bowker, 2002), and practicing “infrastructural inversion” (i.e., foregrounding the aspects that warrant the functioning of infrastructure rather than those it invisibly supports) (Bowker, 1994). Complex ethical and political concerns related to infor-mation infrastructures are illustrated using examples of problems in various areas of study with, for example, International Classification of Diseases (ICD), racism, colonialism, and sexism (Bowker & Star, 1999). Star and Ruhleder (1994, 1996) provided a conceptualiza-tion of infrastructure that challenged the common “tech-nology artifact” view and put information infrastructure forward as a contextualized, “sustained relation” formed by circumstances associated with the following dimen-sions: embeddedness, transparency, reach or scope (tem-poral and spatial), learned as part of membership, links with conventions of practice, embodiment of standards, built on an installed base, and becomes visible upon breakdown (Star & Ruhleder, 1994, 1996, later rephrased in Star, 1999, 2002; Star & Bowker, 2002). Using the viewpoint of PD and the multiple heterogenei-ties involved in information infrastructures, Neumann and Star (1996) explored how potential use, new and old in-frastructures, and large project organizations interact. They discussed how individuals make commitments to information infrastructure projects; balance between dif-ferent “object worlds,” for example, of designers fasci-nated with cutting-edge technologies and users interested in building a sturdy, working piece of infrastructure; and coordinate the varying rhythms and trajectories of differ-ent socio-technical participants. Furthermore, Neumann and Star (1996) identified a para-dox inherent to information infrastructures that is particu-larly relevant for PD: “good working infrastructure is transparent to use, yet good PD makes the problematics of use visible” (p. 231). In discussing the processes of using PD for building infrastructure, they problematize how the varied trajectories of work and decision making come together in “crystallization” points and move on from there, how to deal with the extant infrastructure (“installed base and its inertia”) while innovating and projecting into an uncertain future, and how to determine the users of an unbuilt infrastructural system (Neumann & Star, 1996, pp. 237-239).

ARTFUL INFRASTRUCTURING Almost a decade later, Karasti and collaborators (Karasti & Syrjänen, 2004; Karasti & Baker, 2004) explored in-formation infrastructure work drawing on Star and col-laborators’ information infrastructure notion. Inspired particularly by Star and Bowker’s article, “How to Infra-structure” (2002), they coined the term “infrastructuring” as an attempt to make two points. They emphasized the processual, ongoing quality of infrastructuring activities and drew attention to the extended periods during which infrastructuring unfolds. For the PDC 2004 paper, “Artful Infrastructuring,” Ka-rasti and Syrjänen also drew on Suchman’s notion of “art-ful integrations” (2002), which referred to hybrid systems comprising media, material, and practices. In relation to this notion, design is a process of inscribing knowledge and activities in new material forms. With artful integra-tions, change is perceived as an aspect of everyday prac-tice where a need for continuity mandates that new forms emerge through juxtapositions and connections with ex-isting forms. Artful integration comes from the ongoing alignment of disparate actors. With these two notions, Karasti and Syrjänen aimed to develop sensitivities towards analyzing the continuous processes and interrelated activities comprising infra-structuring over time and as embedded in multi-relational socio-material-technical contexts. Thus, information in-frastructure is viewed as constantly “becoming” in addi-tion to its complexly relational qualities. Karasti and Syrjänen (2004) studied two very different communities of practice: a way-of-life community of dog hobbyists and a community of information managers within a large-scale research network. The community members with a variety of non-IT-professional back-grounds were united in community identity through common causes, shared interests, and strong commit-ments. They engaged in a variety of tasks and practices (cf. “bricolage”) that offered them a rich understanding of their domain. Because the communities had sharing, trust building, and learning environments, and because the members were aware of the long-term quality of the community’s raison d´être they were able to develop technology design practices where appreciation of diver-sity, care orientation, and long-term responsibility were key elements (Karasti & Baker, 2008). This judicious technology approach allowed for the accounting of the existing systems and procedures as well as the data col-lected and valued by the community (i.e., the installed base). Infrastructuring emerged as a way to advance the over-arching community interests. It integrated with the com-munities’ ongoing activities and was embedded in multi-ple contexts relevant for the communities over extended periods (Karasti et al., 2006). Considerations of these multiple relations and processual qualities of continuity allowed the communities to “grow” their infrastructures in an ongoing, long-term manner (Karasti & Baker, 2008). Karasti et al. (2010) put forward—through a jux-taposition of “project time” and “infrastructure time”—the notion of “continuing design.” They expanded the

earlier concept of “continuing design in use” (Henderson & Kyng, 1991) in order to broaden from focusing solely on “use” and to propose a more inclusive approach where the boundaries between use, design, implementation, modification, maintenance, and redesign are blurred. Continuing design considers the past by attending to the “installed base” and relies on temporally open-ended ac-tivity and the long-term perspective required for sustaina-ble collaborative infrastructure development (Karasti et al., 2010).

INFRASTRUCTURING IN THE WORKPLACE In their article, “Infrastructuring: Work Infrastructure Improvement in Organizations,” Pipek and Wulf (2009) established a perspective on organizational IT as a work infrastructure and formulated their design-oriented take on “infrastructuring.” They focused on the infrastructural nature of organizational IT systems and discussed chal-lenges for collaboratively designing within and for this type of infrastructure. Their goal was to develop method and tool support for the activities of all stakeholders that contribute to work infrastructure improvement. The term “work infrastructure” aims to shift attention from the more typical focus on designers and their design process to “how the technologies undergoing design, and the de-sign process itself, are embedded in an existing work en-vironment” (Pipek & Wulf, 2009, p. 449). Pipek and Wulf drew on and furthered the idea of “infrastructure improvement” for work infrastructures (Lundberg & Hanseth, 2001) that relies on two basic recommendations: 1) work infrastructures should be designed and imple-mented primarily by their users and while in use (recog-nizing the separation of design and use as a problem in information systems approaches in general), and 2) con-sideration should be given to the old technological sys-tems (installed base) in the design of new systems in the workplace. Pipek and Wulf (2009) discussed the information infra-structure dimensions they saw as particularly relevant in relation to work infrastructure and their design interests: size, longevity, and people as elements of information infrastructure. They considered whether large-scale is an important characteristic of infrastructure and stated, “the concept of infrastructure remains useful regardless of the artifact’s sheer size … rather it is the degree of customary shared use that defines the level of globalness” (Pipek & Wulf, 2009, p. 456). Thus, they found it useful to bound the scope of the information infrastructure by its organi-zational use. Similarly, they considered the issue of lon-gevity as “the perceived stability at the level of users’ experience” that is “more important than the actual stabil-ity of network cables and other underlying devices” (Pipek & Wulf, 2009, p. 457). Further, they saw users as a “social infrastructure” that significantly contributes to establishing technology usages in work settings. They assumed workers “have a variety of skills related to using and improving work Information Technology infrastruc-ture” (Pipek & Wulf, 2009, p. 455); they also considered “everybody involved in these processes to be actors who perform a deliberate, creative activity directed toward what they consider a lasting improvement” (p. 456). Thus, according to their view, “the infrastructure of a

worker or organization is the entirety of devices, tools, technologies, standards, conventions, and protocols on which the individual worker or the collective rely to carry out the tasks and achieve the goals assigned to them” (Pipek & Wulf, 2009, p. 455). Pipek and Wulf (2009) proposed a framework for infra-structuring where they differentiated between the two spheres of “work” and “technology” related activities, as well as between background, preparatory, and in situ ac-tivities. The crux in the rather elaborate, layered frame-work of work/technology development activities are the moments (called “the points of infrastructure”) when an infrastructure becomes visible to its users either during instances of infrastructure breakdown or local innovation, and the users shift from using the technology to reflecting or modifying it. In their view, infrastructuring activities can inform a search for possible “points of infrastructure” that will evoke improvements for work infrastructure. In order to operationalize the framework, Pipek and Wulf used the salient characteristics of infrastructure (Star & Bowker, 2002) to identify design activities that can be employed to bring about change to work infrastructures.

INFRASTRUCTURING IN COMMUNITIES The notion of infrastructuring has also been applied with-in a PD subfield that is concerned with PD efforts in communities (DiSalvo et al., 2012). This body of work sees the importance of retaining the original democratic ideals of PD while focusing on a wider range of social relations than are typical of traditional PD studies in the workplace. Community PD researchers maintain that communities are social constructs with open, dynamic, and heterogeneous structures for participation, and thus are very different from the more formal organizational workplace structures. Therefore, new theories, concepts, and methods that consider the different relationships and values in these settings are needed. Consequently, several researchers and research groups have applied the notion of infrastructuring together with other newly adopted conceptualizations, such as things, publics, and commons.

Infrastructuring and “Things” Ehn and collaborators’ (Ehn, 2008; Björgvinsson et al., 2010; Björgvinsson et al., 2012a) interest in infrastructur-ing is intimately tied with their aim to reinvigorate de-mocracy in the more heterogeneous contexts of current PD undertakings. Since 2007, they have explored alterna-tives within the Malmö Living Labs (MLL) by working with marginalized social movements through interven-tionist action research-oriented approaches. Based on this work, they put forward a perspective focusing on partici-pation in designing “things” and on strategies for infra-structuring them. Conceptually, they drew together “things” (as opposed to narrow objects), “infrastructur-ing” (as opposed to temporally limited projects), and “ag-onistic public spaces” (as opposed to consensual decision-making). The starting point for “things” as socio-material assem-blies has been influenced by Latour’s actor-network con-ception involving collectives of humans and non-humans (Ehn, 2008). This is used to explore design environments as socio-material frameworks for “matters of concern”

and the alignment of controversies, and to open up new ways of thinking and behaving for designers. Initially, Ehn viewed infrastructuring as a form of “design games in use” that would go beyond the traditional PD project (2008). He put forward infrastructuring as “design after design” juxtaposing it with the idea of “use before use,” found, for instance, in prototyping. This contrast underscored the idea that designing “a useful system” during project time was limited and that infrastructuring would correspond to designing possibilities for “future-games.” Ehn stated:

As a consequence it becomes crucial in the design-games at project time to support design-in-use, design-games at use time. Hence, there will be a shift in focus from design-games aiming at useful products and ser-vices, to design-games to create good environments for design-games at use time. Typically this will at project time lead to an occupation with identifying, designing and supporting social, technical and spatial infrastruc-tures that are configurable and potentially supportive of future design-games in everyday use (Ehn, 2008, p. 96).

While this suggests a step towards more longitudinal de-sign, the temporal locus of future design games is discon-tinuous (i.e., present efforts are directed towards, but sep-arate from, the unspecified future state). In further devel-opments, infrastructuring became viewed as an opportuni-ty to extend design towards more open-ended, long-term, and continuous processes where time and resources could be allotted in a flexible manner and diverse stakeholders could innovate together (Björgvinsson et al., 2010, 2012a). This more organic approach facilitates the emer-gence of possibilities along the way, and new design op-portunities can evolve through the continuous matchmak-ing process (Hillgren et al., 2011). Thus, “things” also need to be established as long-term relationships in which continuous co-creation can be realized, and in which those involved pay attention to, and work with, the way technology connects to wider systems of socio-material relationships in the form of the collective interweaving of people, objects, and processes (Björgvinsson et al., 2010). With the focus on “agonistic public spaces” in recent work (Björgvinsson et al., 2012b), an understanding of infrastructuring is construed more explicitly as a long-term platform for social innovation. Through three col-laborating living lab innovation milieus (“The Stage,” “The Neighborhood,” and “The Factory” at the MLL), a constellation of relationships is embedded in the local community and engaged in ongoing processes of align-ment among varied contexts (Björgvinsson et al., 2012b, p. 130). This view is particularly informed by Dewey’s concept of “publics,” which is characterized by heteroge-neity and conflict (1927), and Mouffe’s “agonistic de-mocracy” (2000), which views democracy as founded upon a radical pluralism with the ability to contest, rather than upon a homogenous field with the requirement for consensus. Ehn and collaborators found these concepts valuable in framing their PD projects, where “the real challenge is to design where no consensus seems to be within immediate reach” (Ehn, 2008). They also saw the concepts as being

“very much in line” with the early Scandinavian model of PD and struggles for democracy at work (Björgvinsson et al., 2012b, p. 129). Other researchers studying infrastruc-turing have also applied the notion of “publics,” as the following sections discuss.

Infrastructuring and “Publics” on a Community Scale Le Dantec and DiSalvo (2013) were particularly interest-ed in how the notion of infrastructuring plays out in the formation of “publics” in PD at scales of particular com-munities. They turned to Dewey (1927) in defining pub-lics not as a single a priori mass of people, but as a par-ticular configuration of individuals bound by common cause in confronting a shared issue. Thus, the notion of publics recognizes a plurality of voices and positions, and provides an issue-oriented focus of relevance in commu-nity-based work. It further “provides PD with a pragmatic perspective for engaging community settings where par-ticipants and authority dynamics form complex and fluid social alignments” (Le Dantec & DiSalvo, 2013, p. 246). In order to understand the relationships involved in the constitution of publics, Le Dantec and DiSalvo drew on the concept of “attachments” that Marres (2007) put for-ward as a way to address the interplay of “dependency on” and “commitment to” that occurs as publics enlist the resources of its multifarious memberships. The notion of attachments places in the forefront the dynamic relation-ships formed around issues, which is in contrast with the notion of “frames,” which are usually characterized as relatively stable entities (e.g., entrenched authority struc-tures). Whereas frames largely involve working around known issues, attachments relate to responding to evolv-ing commitments and dependencies. The notion of at-tachments also connects to the ongoing discourse about the role of PD as a means for engaging with power struc-tures and marginalization. Le Dantec and DiSalvo (2013) turned to Latour and Weibel (2005) as an example of an inquiry into the rela-tionship between design and Deweyian publics. Latour and Weibel’s notion of object-oriented democracy de-notes a democracy in which objects and things are acknowledged as playing a vital role and in which publics are increasingly formed around future things. For infra-structuring in particular, Le Dantec and DiSalvo drew on Ehn and collaborators’ work. They were specifically in-terested in the socio-technical mechanisms of infrastruc-turing for forming and supporting publics:

The idea of infrastructuring through design employs the distinction between PD concerned primarily with de-sign-for-use, centered on useful systems, and PD fo-cused on design-for-future-use, structured to create fer-tile ground to sustain a community of participants. This entails a shift from treating designed systems as fixed products to treating them as ongoing infrastructure, so-cio-technical processes that relate different contexts (Star & Ruhleder, 1996). Infrastructuring, then, is the work of creating socio-technical resources that inten-tionally enable adoption and appropriation beyond the initial scope of the design, a process that might include participants not present during the initial design (Le Dantec & DiSalvo, 2013, p. 247).

Consequently, infrastructuring is set apart from “useful systems” that are conceived as a multi-stakeholder re-sponse to known issues (“frames”), and viewed as feder-ating individuals in the discovery of unknown issues (“at-tachments”) (Le Dantec & DiSalvo, 2013). Le Dantec and DiSalvo (2013) stated, “infrastructuring is a particular mode or practice of PD that develops and provides socio-material resources and experiences by way of attachments toward the constitution of publics” (p. 247). Thus, infra-structuring is a means for discovering and expressing those attachments in order to convey the consequences of an issue and to enroll others in a cause while recognizing that those attachments are dynamic and that they will change.

Infrastructuring and “Publics” on a Societal Scale Whereas the above infrastructuring approaches dealt with community spheres, this section discusses research that addresses society-scale infrastructural systems and broad publics. In comparison to the wealth of community-level work, only a few efforts have brought PD insights to bear on societal information infrastructures. One of these examples is offered by Clement et al. (2012) who brought participatory action research interventions to the context of jurisdictional identity schemes and identifi-cation infrastructures, more specifically drivers’ licenses in Northern America. Aligned with the above community level infrastructuring approaches, Clement and collabora-tors drew on the conceptual resources offered by Dewey, Latour, and Mouffe. For interventions they had an overall goal of rendering ID infrastructures and their transfor-mations more publicly visible, understandable, accounta-ble, and responsive to public interests. They organized interventions for a variety of groups of citizens at various locations by creating “seriously playful” constructs and situations through which pluralism and disputation could become constructively manifest during the developmental trajectories of information infrastructures. Based on this work, Clement et al. (2012) identified some pertinent challenges in infrastructuring for broad publics. The first challenge is how to achieve in practice the promise of the PD values of inclusion and attention to multiple perspectives in relation to large-scale, mundane networked public infrastructures, in areas such as healthcare, telecommunications, education, banking, gov-ernment services, and transportation, which each play a vital, but unspectacular role in the daily lives of all citi-zens. Second, since these information infrastructures typ-ically already exist, and in many cases have been around for a long time in one form or another, (i.e., they are the invisible “installed base”), a related challenge is how to make the arcane and highly technical systems visible and interesting to citizens who are used to taking them for granted. Third, the challenge of politics, familiar in all PD settings, is even more salient and demanding with infra-structural systems as they are typically highly politically charged endeavors. On the other hand, to balance the de-manding challenges, they also point out that “[c]ontributing to the development of information and communication infrastructures, especially in articulating and serving broad public interests, represents community-based PD’s potentially most rewarding challenge”

(DiSalvo et al., 2012, p. 201). Congruently, the study by Clement et al. (2012) shows how PD-inspired design in-terventions that integrate social/political critique can begin to open up possibilities for infrastructural reform. Clement and collaborators emphasize that PD research and researchers should engage more directly with politi-cal advocacy and movements since the terrain for contes-tation over information systems is now societal in scope.

Infrastructuring and “Commons” A further, emerging stream of work in PD (e.g., Anttila, et al., 2013; Björgvinsson, forthcoming) aims to bring together the concept of commons (Ostrom, 1990) with the notion of infrastructuring. “Commons” is a deeply politi-cal concept from economics that involves a new way of expressing an old idea. The idea is that some things be-long to everybody and, as an aggregate, they comprise a set of resources that should be actively safeguarded and managed. Commons is often referred to as a resource or resource system that is shared and generated by a group of people, that is vulnerable to social dilemmas, and that requires various mechanisms and rules to be robust and sustainable (Hess & Ostrom, 2007). Commons is current-ly gaining a growing interest because it provides alterna-tives to conventional state-led or market-based modes of organization (Hess, 2012). In recent years, interest in commons has expanded from the traditional natural resource commons to new types of information, knowledge, cultural, and creative commons (Hess & Ostrom, 2007). The latter often relies on new infrastructural kinds of digital technologies that allow the formation of new types of communities. Some of the im-portant themes of new commons thinking and creating (i.e., collaboration, participation, openness, and sustaina-bility) align with PD interests. An initial example of PD and infrastructuring comes from cultural commons. Björgvinsson (forthcoming) presented a study in which a temporary infrastructure solution was created through new forms of distributed open innovation and PD (future-making through experimentation in the public) in order to challenge the current film distribution models in Sweden. The initial effort gave rise to a Crea-tive Commons festival to distribute and fund films that is expected to be more long-term, thus concretely suggest-ing a new, alternative form of infrastructure for sharing cultural products and knowledge in the form of cultural commons. Björgvinsson (forthcoming) suggested that infrastructur-ing approaches could benefit by connecting to the debate and practices concerned with commons. In particular, he pointed out that the commons debate has taken a strong standpoint in relation to the questions of how to balance local and global needs as well as the imbalance between private property and resources versus the common good.

DISCUSSING EMERGING THEMES The above characterizations of infrastructuring approach-es open up thinking about PD in several ways. They bring forth themes, some new and some recurring, that may need to be revisited because information infrastructures and infrastructuring take PD to unfamiliar territory that is

more heterogeneous, complex, and extended in various scopes than in the past.

(Re)considering the (Un)familiar Terrains for the Study of Infrastructuring The first (re)consideration concerns the expansion of in-terest from the mere technology component to a more comprehensive, locally relevant, “embedded” combina-tion of technologies that are “linked with conventions of practice” (Star & Ruhleder, 1994, 1996). Ehn (2008), followed by others (Björgvinsson et al., 2012a; Clement et al., 2012; Le Dantec & DiSalvo, 2013), made a very clear point regarding this by criticizing modern design for its obsession with the isolated product/object and resort-ing to the more inclusive notions of “design things,” “matters of concern,” and “publics.” In a similar vein, Pipek and Wulf (2009) argued that work and technology should be designed together, and Karasti and Syrjänen (2004) held that in community contexts infrastructuring integrates with meaningful, raison d’être activities for furthering community interests. This shift, in broadening the focus from mere technology to its embedding context of practice, inevitably (re)calls for paying attention to the deeply socio-technical nature of infrastructuring. In STS tradition, this is premised in the idea of the mutual constitution/shaping (“imbrica-tion,” Star, 2002) of the social and the technological. This mutuality is contextually embedded, (i.e., technologies are seen as socially situated). It directs researchers to pay attention to the interdependent and inextricably linked relationships between the social and the technical without making a priori judgments about the relative importance of either or forcing separation between them. In current PD literature, however, the social seems occasionally stripped away from the notion of infrastructuring. We see this both in approaches that aim to develop method sup-port for infrastructuring but confine themselves to tech-nology design, and in the work that employs additional user concepts that—while allowing for more nuanced analyses of the user population—run the risk of reducing the notion of infrastructuring to mere technological as-pects. Furthermore, the mutual constitution of the social and the technological is further emphasized by the notion of in-formation infrastructure as a fundamentally relational concept. Star and Ruhleder explain: “Analytically, infra-structure appears only as a relational property, not as a thing stripped of use” (1996, p. 113). They use a method-ological term of “infrastructural inversion” by Bowker (1994) to illuminate how to de-emphasize things or peo-ple in infrastructuring and make changes in the infrastruc-tural relations central. The salient characteristics of infra-structure (Star & Ruhleder, 1994, 1996), which were put forward as dimensions with which infrastructures emerge, can be used also as sensitizing dimensions in relational analyses of infrastructuring. If the social and the technical are kept apart, or the salient characteristics are used in a mechanistic manner, the analytic potential of the notion is compromised. As a further point, Star and collaborators did not conceive of “relational” as static or fixed, but as dynamic and per-

formative. Newman and Star (1994, p. 236) wrote: “[c]omplex phenomenon such as information infrastruc-tures do not just ‘unfold’ or ‘emerge,’ they are collective accomplishments which are refreshed in the shaping.” Thus, the relational nature of information infrastructure has the quality of a temporally enduring “sustained rela-tion” with activities involved in the shaping. In PD, the added “-ing” in “infrastructuring” brings more emphasis to information infrastructure related work. PD researchers have readily explored activities related to infrastructuring. Some of the vast variety of design-oriented activities are aptly summarized below:

Infrastructuring entangles and intertwines potentially controversial “a priori infrastructure activities” (like se-lection, design, development, deployment, and enact-ment), with “everyday design activities in actual use” (like mediation, interpretation, and articulation), as well as “design in use” (like adaptation, appropriation, tai-loring, re-design, and maintenance) (Björgvinsson et al., 2010, p. 43).

The shift to “infrastructur-ing” is important not only in directing attention to infrastructuring activities but also to the temporal considerations related to infrastructuring (as will be discussed in the following section). Finally, infrastructuring has been taken up as an oppor-tunity to reintroduce politics into PD. In their initial arti-cle, Neumann and Star addressed some deeply political issues involved in making infrastructure, such as the many multiplicities (object worlds, commitments, and trajectories), complex contingencies, and ambiguities (1996). The ensuing research has embraced a variety of ways to engage with politics in PD including: studying non-IT-professional design and making invisible work visible; conducting projects with marginalized communi-ties, embracing communities’ “matters of concern,” and nurturing radical pluralism and the ability to dispute; and challenging existing institutions and creating alternatives. Infrastructuring struggles with heterogeneities and multi-vocalities; multiplicities and marginalities; inclusions and exclusions; silences and absences; and standards and in-visible work. These are all issues that add further com-plexities to the ongoing power related debates in PD, for instance, about the user becoming more diversified, and the designer–user relationship changing.

Temporal Scaling in Infrastructuring Aligning with Star and Ruhleder (1994, 1996) who posed temporal reach or scope as one of the relevant dimensions to consider with information infrastructure, temporal re-considerations have been an integral part of infrastructur-ing in PD. Criticisms of the design project as the preva-lent and taken-for-granted temporal unit of limited dura-tion have led to a changing of focus from product to pro-cess, creating opportunities for future design-in-use (Ehn, 2008), and extending design towards more open-ended, long-term processes (Björgvinsson et al., 2010, 2012a). Interests in non-professional design in communities have opened possibilities for the exploration of longitudinal infrastructuring efforts as they unfold “in the wild” (Ka-rasti & Syrjänen, 2004; Karasti & Baker, 2004, 2008), and the juxtaposing of “project time” with “infrastructure

time” in support of the argument that long-term matters in infrastructuring (Karasti et al., 2010). Awareness seems to have formed in PD around the im-portance of considering longer temporal horizons in infra-structuring. However, there are differences in what longer temporalities mean, which—at least in part—relates to the different contexts in which studies of infrastructuring have been conducted. For example, without going into any further detail in temporal analysis of the approaches, longitudinal future-orientation (ahistoric, from present to open-ended future) is dominant in approaches that focus on constituting communities/publics and developing new infrastructure support for them, whereas those approaches that study organizations or communities with shared his-tories and existing information systems, speak also to the importance of accounting for the past temporal horizon, such as through dealing with the installed base.

Complex Relationships with the Installed Base The above temporal differences start to shed light onto the variety of attitudes towards the installed base in infra-structuring. On one hand, approaches aiming to create new information infrastructures for communities in for-mation and those with strong future orientations do not problematize the installed base. As they are typically more challenged with a variety of other kinds of issues, they find installed base type issues of less (or no) rele-vance. They overlook that some kind of installed base of some infrastructure (on whatever level they are) is needed in all instances of infrastructuring as in today’s connected world we can hardly avoid linking into some existing information infrastructures that provide substrate for new layers or add-ons. These infrastructures with their in-stalled bases may bring in unexpected constraints as well as opportunities. Moreover, with no consideration for the installed base, we may also inadvertently create blind spots, for example, that relate to the PD designers’ and researchers’ preferences and taken-for-granted assump-tions. On the other hand, infrastructuring approaches studying established communities with shared pasts and extant systems typically find that the installed base figures in infrastructuring in important ways. Newman and Star (1996) already asked how to deal with the extant infra-structure (“installed base and its inertia”) while innovat-ing and projecting into an uncertain future. Interestingly enough, the above infrastructuring approaches problema-tize the installed base in two very different ways. First, there is the work by Karasti and collaborators (Ka-rasti & Syrjänen, 2004; Karasti & Baker, 2004, 2008; Karasti et al., 2006, 2010) that could be characterized as managing and sustaining the installed base over time. They describe the judicious technology approach found in the communities, in which the process of infrastructuring often becomes characterized as a continuous struggle with—but also appreciation for—the inertia of the in-stalled base. On one hand, modifications or new technol-ogies need to be integrated; on the other hand, managing continuity with regard to data and technology is vital as highlighted by the “care work” for the existing data and

deep-seated responsibilities for the collaboratively created base. Second, there is infrastructuring work that challenges the existing installed base and actively seeks to create alter-natives. Clement et al. (2012) intervened in the ID scheme development in North America where the aim was to integrate into the installed base a range of new digital technologies that were seen as potentially trouble-some. They experimented with alternatives to this trans-formation. In the example of the Creative Commons for film distribution in Sweden, the installed base confining the values and politics of the existing information infra-structure was questioned and radical alternatives were introduced and implemented (Björgvinsson, forthcom-ing). As these brief examples illustrate, the relationship with the installed base is far from straightforward in PD infra-structuring, ranging from non-interest to maintaining and sustaining, and to challenging and creating alternatives.

Scaling and Bounding the User While the extended temporal scopes of infrastructuring have been explicitly addressed in PD literature, spatial scaling has not received much attention, although it is an important concern in other information infrastructure lit-eratures. Instead, PD researchers have chosen another strategy, which may be more familiar to the tradition, for dealing with the challenge to “scale up.” Scaling has been addressed in terms of the scope of the user “population.” As we have seen, a variety of concepts are used for ex-panded user populations to capture, define, and extend the scope that infrastructuring may have. In addition to the more traditional user concepts in PD, such as worker, participant, stakeholder, constituency, and community of practice/interest, new conceptualizations are used to ex-pand and challenge the more customary ones, such as publics, agonistic public spaces, and commons. In addition, the bounding of the information infrastructure into a manageable constellation becomes an issue of great importance in infrastructuring because information infra-structures are vast and can appear boundless, whereas PD always has situated, contextual underpinnings (Green-baum & Kyng, 1991). In the above infrastructuring ap-proaches, the chosen concepts for the user are also used for bounding the information infrastructures and infra-structuring. By employing traditional workplace notions, Pipek and Wulf (2009) defined the bounding in the work infrastructure and infrastructuring as relevant from the workers’ and organizations’ points of view. Another good example is the concept of “publics.” Whereas Dewey’s “publics” is a state-level concept, it is brought to the community level in community PD (Björgvinsson et al., 2012b; Le Dantec & DiSalvo, 2013). Furthermore, the concept denotes a community identified and constituted by an issue; whereas it provides an issue-oriented focus of relevance for the specific community, it can be simul-taneously considered for bounding the infrastructuring. Another pertinent example is the concept of commons that has, from its beginning, dealt with rules for bounding the borders of a commons. Initially, these rules dealt with

natural resource commons; later, the rules also encom-passed knowledge commons (Hess & Ostrom, 2007). Current PD literature on infrastructuring deals mainly in the scopes of communities and organizations. Therefore, certain questions should be posed: Is the community level enough when we consider the expanding scales related to networked ensembles of people and technologies? (How) is the more recently adopted notion of commons different in scope? Should PD attend to scopes beyond communi-ties (and commons)? Scopes beyond the community’s reach are a demanding challenge for the situated nature of PD. How could we study and design information infra-structures for such extended groups? Could there be forms of infrastructuring that fit with the situated but are, however, capable of crossing boundaries and exploring the multiple scales and scopes of information infrastruc-tures? If we are up to the challenge, we should explore and engage with multi-sitedness and the local-global di-mension of the multi-scope, socio-material-technical-political assemblages and processes of large-scale infra-structuring. Blomberg and Karasti (2013) have recently offered a way to start to address this demanding set of issues when they noted that bounding the studied phenomenon can always be carried out empirically through “constructing the field,” which has long been practiced in ethnography. In the following quote, they discuss ethnographers, but their message also applies to other researchers involved in sim-ilar in situ, empirical investigations, such as PD designer-researchers:

[The field] is reflexively constructed by every choice the ethnographer makes in selecting, connecting, and bounding the [field] and via the interactions through which s/he engages with the material artifacts and the people who define the field. Ethnographers define the objects and subjects of their research during fieldwork, informed by their interests and motivations. [Fields] as unbounded spaces of possibilities are continuously “carved out” by the ethnographer in relation to specific resources, situations, and opportunities in the settings (Blomberg & Karasti, 2013, p. 389).

Reflexively constructing the field is likely to be particu-larly important when studying complex, spatially and temporally extended phenomena, such as information infrastructures and infrastructuring. This kind of empiri-cally-based, reflexive take on bounding the information infrastructure and infrastructuring has been lacking to a large extent in the PD field. Another aspect that relates to the scaling and bounding of the user is political in nature. With the extended scales of information infrastructures, (potential) users become both greater in numbers and more diversified. Neumann and Star (1996) already asked who are the users of an unbuilt infrastructural system, and discussed the ambiguities and conflicting views on users in large information infrastruc-ture development undertakings. In PD, we are used to thinking about users in terms of participants to our pro-jects. Reaching and including all citizens, such as in the case of societal information infrastructures, is practically impossible. The issues of how participants are chosen and

where the boundaries are drawn are, as always, highly political. At this point, in addition, it may be due time to start paying more attention also to the non-participants and non-users. While communities and publics sound inclusive as concepts, there are always processes of membership and selection going on. It is likely to become increasingly important to consider the multiplicity of hu-man actors and address issues of multiple identities, het-erogeneity, and marginality, such as nonstandard users (Star, 1991), and the varieties of non-users (Oudshoorn & Pinch, 2008). As Law (2004) suggests, processes of “Othering” are also methodological issues. We as re-searchers and designers should be more aware that we—purposely or inadvertently—create absences, exclusions, and deletions with our use of methods in infrastructuring.

Information Infrastructure as an Object of Design Neumann and Star (1996) discussed information infra-structures as objects of design. They drew on Bucciarel-li’s notion of “object worlds” (1988) that highlights how different participants and stakeholders with different competencies, responsibilities, and interests “see” the object of design differently. Neumann and Star suggested that flexibility is needed in bringing together the multi-plicity of “object worlds” into a shared “object universe” in information infrastructure building. They evoked met-aphors and Watson-Verran’s “imaginary” (1994) as ex-amples that can be used for managing ambiguity and translating among various object world views. Furthermore, Neumann and Star (1996) stated, “good working infrastructure is transparent to use, yet good PD makes the problematics of use visible” (p. 231). The problem relates to the taken-for-granted, ready-to-hand, invisible, and quietly supportive character of information infrastructures. In design, the object of design is tradi-tionally “foregrounded” and is the central focus of atten-tion. However, the information infrastructure can be too mundane to be of any interest for the participants, too large to comprehend, or continuously in danger of disap-pearing into the background. Thus, Clement et al. (2012) argue that it is important to inquire how to make the mundane, which is typically in the background, visible and interesting enough for users to engage. Pipek and Wulf (2009) and Clement et al. (2012) at-tempted to address the invisibility issue using another salient characteristic, that is, “information infrastructure becomes visible upon breakdown,” as an opening for making information infrastructure visible and fore-grounded for participants. Furthermore, in their attempts to render ID infrastructures and their transformation more publicly understandable and interesting, Clement et al. (2012) explored critical yet constructive activities that may be ironic or humorous when implemented; for ex-ample, they created “seriously playful” critique and de-sign strategies to engage with citizens. The work on these aspects of infrastructuring has merely begun.

CONCLUDING THOUGHTS It has been almost two decades since Star and collabora-tors’ initial work (Neumann & Star, 1996; Star & Ruhle-der, 1994, 1996). Opening up PD for infrastructuring has brought about new challenges that relate to increased het-

erogeneities and complexities as well as scaling along multiple dimensions. The notion of information infra-structure has inspired a variety of approaches that aim to address these challenges by exploring infrastructuring in PD. Some approaches have focused on communities that do infrastructuring work in a participatory manner, while others have aimed to develop design method support for infrastructuring. Some approaches have explored infra-structuring as design within communities, and yet others have considered infrastructuring as an element supporting the formation of publics. While this article celebrates the variety (and thus makes no claims for any “right ways”), it is also a reminder of the importance of getting to know initial and existing work, as well as learning about the traditions and underlying assumptions involved. The dimensions of infrastructuring discussed in the above approaches cover several of the salient characteristics comprising Star and collaborators’ information infrastruc-ture notion. At this point, it is also of interest to note some information infrastructure aspects that have not been addressed in infrastructuring, including semantics, standards, and generativity. Data issues and standardiza-tion efforts have not traditionally been in the purview of research topics within PD. Currently, however, PD de-signers and researchers are increasingly finding them-selves faced with various larger-scale efforts that inter-vene in the more traditional-scale PD projects. For exam-ple, in working within healthcare and hospital systems, regional integration and national standardization efforts raise the question of how to account for and/or engage with those efforts. Furthermore, it is rather surprising that generativity has not been addressed since it is a concept that clearly speaks to the technology-user relationship, which is of central interest to PD. In fact, one might as-sume that PD research could contribute to this in im-portant ways by providing some grounded views to chal-lenge some of the utopian expectations related to genera-tivity in wider discussions. The line of thinking and conceptual work going on in the PD field is open and inclusive, and the boundaries of in-frastructuring are seen as permeable and dynamic. This resonates well with the relational quality and multiple extended scopes of the information infrastructure notion and allows an exploration of the complex information infrastructures as well as the associated infrastructuring activities and processes. However, the majority of the current literature on infrastructuring in PD deals with work organization and community settings. Infrastructur-ing, nevertheless, occurs in all walks of life, crosses old boundaries, and gives rise to new kinds of multi-scale, human-technical groupings as well as new connections and resistances (Blomberg & Karasti, 2012). Therefore, studies on infrastructuring in PD need to engage these transitions and become more diversified so we can more broadly understand the information infrastructure and infrastructuring issues involved. One crucial element in this is that we need to design our studies so that they al-low us to address the complex, multi-scope, and multi-scale phenomena information infrastructures and infra-structuring inherently are. Thus, it is of utmost im-portance that we learn to construct the field to match the

scope of the phenomena we study (Blomberg & Karasti, 2013), and we must also develop our research and design methods to match the scope. There is a lot of promise in the PD research on infrastruc-turing, but in some ways we are still in the very beginning phases of addressing information infrastructure and infra-structuring issues as there are great challenges involved with this increasingly ubiquitous phenomenon. We may also need to explore some other research and design para-digms, which complement, extend or challenge the cur-rent spatially-oriented paradigm, for instance, by turning to mobilities (e.g., Büscher et al., 2011), co-presence (Beaulieu, 2010), or temporalities (Dalsgaard & Nielsen, 2013).

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This research was supported by Academy Research Fel-lowship funding from the Academy of Finland.

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