Designing for Collaborative Infrastructuring

'Infrastructuring' as a concept draws attention to the way in which a designed artefact or system is not the end of the development process. Rather, technology development takes place up to, and including, its successful establishment in an associated body of practices. This places emphasis upon the role of practitioners as designers of their own practice environments. While the activities of professional technology development have been reasonably well discussed and conceptualized, activities that practitioners perform to make things work for them are less acknowledged as a systematic contribution to the successful establishment of the use of IT. This paper considers in particular the so-called 'point of infrastructuring': the moment at which practitioners become aware of opportunities to (re-)design their infrastructures, usually initiated by breakdowns or the recognition of potential innovations and reconsideration of current infrastructural use. From this point onwards, end users themselves may start configuring, tailoring or developing new conventions until a point has been reached in which a new technology usage has been successfully established. However, points of infrastructuring do not only provoke end-user driven in-situ design (or 'infrastructuring') activities. They also evoke so-called 'resonance activities'. These encompass all of the observations and communications that attend upon a point of infrastructure as it becomes visible within a work environment. Examination of resonance activities can be a starting point for a better understanding of the practitioner's activities beyond single infrastructural changes, providing a way of highlighting the relationship between different points of infrastructuring. How to capture and understand resonance activities and how to design technological support for them is still an open question. Based on previous work outlined in the literature and an empirical study that looked at collaborative appropriation activities (the most important aspect of infrastructuring) during 3D printing processes, we outline the concept of sociable technologies as a technological approach for capturing and supporting resonance activities and thus enabling infrastructuring activities more broadly.