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Constructing the Field Methodological Reflections for Infrastructuring in Participatory Design

Information infrastructures challenge us to open up thinking about Participatory Design (PD) in several respects. One of the ways to address these challenges in PD has been the adoption of the notion of ‘infrastructuring’. While existing infrastructuring efforts in PD include new methodological developments related to analyzing the infrastructural phenomenon and developing method support for design, little attention has been given to considering what kinds of empirical landscapes infrastructuring involves and how they can be accounted for in fieldwork-based inquiry and design. This paper puts forward the notion of ‘constructing the field’ as an attempt to open up thinking about the empirical component in infrastructuring. Constructing the field involves questioning the initial notion of the ‘field’, extending the field by following the phenomenon, and bounding the field through processes of sensitizing and decision-making. Several conceptualizations of the ‘field’ offer alternatives for pursuing the phenomenon in meaningful ways yet with different emphases. By constructing the field infrastructuring efforts can both remain situated within specific contextual settings, which is a key principle in PD, and – at the same time – broaden and diversify the field to accommodate for the complex sociotechnical constellations and processes reaching over extended scopes that characterize infrastructuring as an object of design and inquiry. Helena Karasti (2014): Constructing the Field Methodological Reflections for Infrastructuring in Participatory Design. In International Reports on Socio-Informatics (IRSI), Proceedings of the PDC 2014, Infrastructuring, Collaboration and Evolving Socio-Material Practices of Changing Our World (Vol. 11, Iss. 2, pp. 29-38)