Wandering as a design strategy for infrastructuring

Abstract

The notion of design gradually diverges from its conceptualization as framed design projects that focus on the production of objects. It shifts to open-ended processes that are oriented toward the creation of services and the congregation of organizations. In the participatory design (PD) scene the emerging future-oriented design-after-design approach is understood as a process of ‘infrastructuring’. The co-design process of Recup’Kitchen is described as an example of an infrastructuring design practice within the Brussels urban living lab of the Incubators of Public Spaces research. The empirical findings of the related action-research bring up the importance of ‘wandering’ in the design process. The design journey unfolds as an explorative endeavor without a clearly outlined direction. The paper argues that this wandering contributed to a process of infrastructuring. Three factors of the wandering in the Recup’Kitchen design are discussed: multi-layered openness, future-oriented incompleteness and strategic dialogue. This framework is based on a combination of a theoretical framework and the empirical findings within the Recup’Kitchen case. Together these factors of wandering illustrate how such a design approach can benefit infrastructuring activities. Recognizing the benefits of a loss of control and an entanglement in the messiness, the article suggests implementing this spontaneous wandering practice as a design strategy.

Keywords: participatory design, infrastructuring, wandering design process, urban living lab, multi-layered openness, future-oriented incompleteness, strategic dialogue.