Infrastructuring for opening production, from participatory design to participatory making?

Abstract

Fabriken is a makerspace, a public workshop equipped with tools and machines that can be used to make (almost) anything: from fixing a flat tire to build a robot, from backing to meet new people. This space has been set up with the aim of opening production, to investigate what happens when means of production are made public and when people make things together by sharing facilities and skills.From a participatory design perspective the making of Fabriken can be understood as process of design-fordesign and infrastructuring. The paper discusses how Fabriken came to be and how, in looking for a strategy to design-for-design and infrastructuring, there has been a shift from a design-before-use to a design-in-use approach, where the tactics of events, small-scale interventions and long-term engagement have been used to foster a process of participatory making of the space.

Concordance: A Critical Participatory Alternative in Healthcare IT

“…infrastructuring) to allow people to participate in ongoing design processes (design-in-use) [5]. As such, infrastructuring calls for attention to the active role of people as designers, through use, to develop support for practices that could not be envisioned before use [16].…”

“…Here, infrastructuring is used within the design literature (see e.g. Ehn [5] and Seravelli [16]), to explore how to design meta-designs, or designing for design after design, and how diverse stakeholders through constantly ongoing design processes design-in-use rather than designing for use before use.…”

Towards commons design in participatory design

“…While most design approaches tend to focus on particular artefacts, neglecting -more or less -the surroundings in which the artefacts are placed, it is precisely these surroundings that become a concern for infrastructuring (Pipek & Wulf 2009). Accordingly, when doing infrastructuring, a lot of design work turns towards a continuous alignment between contexts and the ways in which agency is socially achieved (Björgvinsson et al 2010/2012a/2012b, Seravalli 2012Lindström & Ståhl 2014). From this point of view, infrastructuring becomes an engagement in experimenting with ways of achieving this alignment (Hillgren et al 2011;Pipek & Wulf 2009) while accounting for the creative 'design' activities of professional designers and users across the divide and beyond technology (Karasti & Syrjänen 2004, Pipek & Syrjänen 2006 without necessarily privileging either view.…”

Democratising Design in Scientific Innovation: Application of an Open Value Network to Open Source Hardware Design

“…The democratisation of digital technologies and proliferation of open source software (Corsín Jiménez, 2014;Marttila & Botero, 2013) has provided individuals and groups with unparalleled access to design and production tools. Following the success of free and open source software (FOSS), the production of open source hardware (OSH) has been gaining momentum (OSHWA, 2016b;Seravalli, 2012Seravalli, , 2013 in recent years with several communities attempting to formalise its various aspects. These include Peerto-Peer (P2P) communities supporting OSH production environments through distributed communication networks (Bauwens, 2009;Benkler, 2006); communities investigating licensing issues, such as the Open Hardware License (OHL); and Engineering and Design communities creating participatory platforms that promote access to, and sharing of, hardware designs and code (Corsín Jiménez, 2014).…”

“…This paper builds on the work of open source scientific hardware (OSSH) and emerging concepts in participatory design (e.g. Björgvinsson, 2014;Marttila et al, 2014;Marttila & Botero, 2013;Seravalli, 2012Seravalli, , 2013 with a focus on commons-based peer production. How do open production environments foster engagement and innovation?…”