A Systematic Literature Review of Infrastructure Studies in SIGCHI

Abstract

Infrastructure is an indispensable part of human life. In the past decades, the Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) community has paid increasing attention to human interactions with infrastructure. In this paper, we conducted a systematic literature review on infrastructure studies in SIGCHI, one of the most influential communities in HCI. We collected a total of 190 primary studies; the corpus includes studies published between 2006 and 2024. Most of the studies are inspired by Susan Leigh Star’s notion of infrastructure. We discover three themes of infrastructure studies, including growing infrastructure, appropriating infrastructure, and coping with infrastructure. We foreground the overall trend of infrastructure studies in SIGCHI, which focuses on informal infrastructural activities in various socio-technical contexts. Especially, we discuss studies that problematize infrastructures and alert the HCI community about the underlying harmful side of infrastructure.