Designing infrastructures for creative engagement

As museums extend their scope beyond the traditional exhibition space and into everyday practices and institutions it is necessary to develop suitable conceptualisations of how technology can be understood and designed. To this end, we propose that the concept of socio-technical infrastructures provides a useful frame for discussing important challenges and opportunities in terms of engaging audiences. We further argue that when designing infrastructures, one of the important challenges is to develop the social aspect of infrastructure in the form of creating, maintaining and developing relationships to institutions and organizations within local communities. We argue that this is as much an object of design as technical systems and discuss the relational work needed to engage in this activity. We illustrate the ideas of infrastructure and relational work through a case study of the design of a system for cultural heritage engagement for the Danevirke museum covering issues relating to the Danish minority in northern Germany.