Infrastructuring by Design

Abstract

In this book, we regard the initiatives of creative communities as a matter of infrastructuring and this involves considering what kind of process might support these activities towards a transformation into working public-interest services. We loosely tested with this process within the ‘Creative Citizens’ project and, to a lesser extent, within ‘Welcome to St Gilles’, ‘Green Camden’ and ‘The NYC Office for Public Imagination’: we built it on the go, adapting the process step by step, without a fixed sequence of actions, just setting the ‘weak framework conditions’ in order to make things happen. This is a critical chapter of the book: we attempted to outline the whole journey into an infrastructuring process of ten main phases, from the first step of meeting a community of active citizens to the implementation stage focusing on service legacy and legitimacy. Hence, after having identified the characteristics of a collaborative infrastructure in the previous chapter, we now describe how such an infrastructure becomes an on-going process of infrastructuring a set of resources and actors in a specific context and timeframe that, hopefully, can be applied to other situations. This also means dealing with the issue of possible replication of such processes, which is why, at the end of the chapter, we compare our infrastructuring path to other frameworks in which citizen participation and design intervention play a central role.