Drawing Together: Infrastructuring and Politics for Participatory Design - a visual collection of cases, issues, questions, and relevant literature.

This e-zine documents the discussions and group work done at the ‘Infrastructuring in Participatory Design’ workshop, a full-day event that took place at the Participatory Design Conference 2018 in Hasselt and Genk, Belgium¹. The workshop invited the Participatory Design (PD) community to come together, with their cases or projects, questions and topics of interest in order to take stock of empirical insights and conceptual developments around the notions of infrastructure and infrastructuring, and their relevance to the revitalization of the political agenda of PD. Following a hands-on approach, participants - collectively and critically - mapped issues, disentangled assumptions, identified blind spots, and outlined new research opportunities charting the possibilities and limitations of an infrastructuring approach in Participatory Design at large. Participants at the workshop came from a broad range of domains (e.g. Design, Science and Technology Studies, Anthropology, Social Sciences, Information Sciences, Architecture), representing interests in infrastructuring from multiple perspectives. Prior to the workshop, participants were asked to 1) write a position statement and read everyone else's position statements, 2) look at their own work in relation to the theme of the workshop to pick one artifact to bring to the workshop, 3) contribute to a collective compilation of research literature dealing with infrastructures and infrastructuring. With these activities, we together prepared issues, ideas, and concerns to work with in the workshop.