The nature of design has always been related to socio-technological forces. In the twentieth century, the first and second orders of design were central in the establishment of graphic and industrial design. In the early years of the twenty-first century, the third and fourth orders of design were related to interactions and environments. This description can be associated with different phases of the Industrial Revolution: the first two phases allowed the transition from a farming and feudal society to an industrial and capitalist one, a third one was related to a post-industrial or services society. The Fourth Industrial Revolution presents the Internet, 3D printers and genetic algorithms as the main technical achievements and green energies as the energy source. It is related to computers, software, artificial intelligence, the Internet of Things and machine learning. These technological forces will create the space for the most important design jobs of the future.

The term city infrastructures is often restricted to the physical elements of a city, while in practice it comprises both hard infrastructures for built environment and utilities, as well as soft infrastructures involving services, social groupings and personal skills. Part of the confusion is the lack of clarity about the role and delivery of city infrastructures and its relationship to livelihood and livability. To address this issue, a framework for soft and hard city infrastructures has been developed using results from two case studies to model the relationships, conflicts and connections between soft and hard infrastructures. The first case study concerns the abandonment of a planned urban regeneration project for the Italian City of Lucca in Tuscany where institutional inertia prevented regeneration of a derelict tobacco factory. The second case study concerned results from data analysis of contributions for a public consultation exercise for City of Christchurch in New Zealand. The syntactic data analytics using Flax software coupled with data visualisation demonstrated how an urban narrative can be constructed about citizen priorities based on a framework for soft and hard city infrastructures. The methodology enables citizen engagement through cultivating open processes of urban exploration that advocate ‘connected infrastructures’ thinking.

Urban Narrative works at the interface between public participation and participatory design to support collaboration processes for urban planning and design. It applies computational linguistics to interpret large format public consultation by identifying shared interests and desired qualities for urban infrastructure services and utilities. As a proof of concept, data was used from the Christchurch public engagement initiative called ‘Share an Idea,’ where public thoughts, ideas, and opinions were expressed about the future redevelopment of Christchurch after the 2011 earthquakes. The data set was analysed to identify shared interests and desired connections between institutional, communal, or personal infrastructures with the physical urban infrastructures in terms of buildings, public places, and utilities. The data has been visualised using chord charts from the D3 JavaScript open source library to illustrate the existence of connections between soft and hard urban infrastructures along with individual contributions or stories. Lastly, the analysis was used to create an infographic design brief that compares and contrasts qualitative information from public consultation with quantitative municipal statistical data on well-being.

Design does not happen in a vacuum. Designers work with external material and in the context of our diverse and globalized culture. In times that are now gone, these sources where very limited. Nowadays -in the global village of digital communication -there are a super-abundance of resources disposable at the click of a mouse. Everyone'seyes are constantly flooded with a waterfall of visual material of the most diverse origin and quality. Design students and professionals, having this vast reservoir of resources, are living in the age of abundance. Is this making them any better? KeywoRds Communication Design. Abundance. Scarcity. Recebido em: 17/03/2014; aceito em: 24/03/2014. Esta obra foi licenciada com uma Licença Creative Commons.

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