Johan Redström

Materializing infrastructures for participatory hacking

This paper presents a design exploration of opportunities for opening up industrial infrastructures in order to make them supportive of more sustainable and locally adaptive configurations. Taking logistic services in a rural area as a case study, we describe a set of interventions in tracing and expressing their underlying functionalities to make them available as design material. The insights gained inspired the speculative design of a concept for a distributed and community-owned delivery network performed by drones. The case illustrates the potential that can be made available when opening up infrastructures for participative design interventions.

Commentaries on the special issue on practice-oriented approaches to sustainable HCI

As evidenced by this special issue, practice is a subject of considerable interest in sustainable HCI. This includes studying everyday practices and their relation to sustainability, and considering practice as a unit of design [Kuijer et al. 2013], that is, as something that might be approached in a manner akin to the design of products and services. This turn towards practices and practice theory is an important contribution to the development of HCI because it focuses research and design attention toward the common activities of life and how those common activities are woven together with a wide range of sustainability concerns. For instance, through investigations into the practices of repair we can gain valuable insight into tactical alternatives to the prevailing logics of planned obsolescence [Wakkary et al. 2013]. Similarly, attending to the corporeal aspects of the everyday, from the sensation of cold feet [Pink et al. 2013] to the experience of walking [Bidwell et al. 2013], reminds us that sustainability is a lived endeavor. In the tradition of critical reflective HCI [Sengers et al. 2005], in this essay I offer another way to conceptualize practices, and specifically, the relation of design to everyday practices and sustainable HCI. Critical and reflective approaches play an important role in sustainable HCI by analyzing the epistemologies that undergird research and design, and offering generative interpretations that can be used to produce interventions and ever-thicker descriptions. In this essay, I provide a shift in perspective that calls attention to the relational character of practices and explicitly includes design as being among those everyday practices. In discussing ‘design’ I’m referring to design within HCI specifically, but most of my assertions and arguments may also be extended to design more broadly. What is most significant to this special issue is that the perspectives of practice theory offers

Trojans a Drones : Materializing possibilities for transforming industrial infrastructures

Emerging post-industrial societal needs require the evolution of existing networks of industrial infrastructures toward more distributed and citizen-centered configurations. This opens up new questions regarding what design processes and practices are necessary to effect change within these systems that are often deliberately not accessible and open for design interventions. We here present a set of design explorations in tracing and materializing infrastructures in order to make them available for design and participation, taking logistic services in a remote ruralarea of northern Sweden as a case study and field site. A design concept consisting of a drone and drone postbox were used to speculate about the possibility of a community-owned delivery network operated by dronesin synergy with existing infrastructures. We used these artifacts in staging participatory processes of imagination and experimentation in order to explore possible future configurations. The project provides an example of a possible framework for initiating and curating the transformationof industrial systems towards more open and locally adaptive forms and functions.In particular, it illustrates the rich potential and opportunities for design when it comes to ways of knowing and designing with the infra- structural—that which is usually hidden beneath the surface.