Design Anthropology (DA) is an involved anthropology, that seeks to correspond with the lives of others, through interventions that engage with people’s hopes and longings, that directly influence activities in the present and what people come to anticipate or imagine into the future. DA is centrally concerned with how futures emerge ongoingly, through the social (re)production of daily life (Ehn, Nilsson and Topgaard 2014). For Design Anthropologists, Gatt and Ingold (2013) Figure 7: The first The Monthly
Feast
Titled ‘A new beginning’
Figure 8: The second The Monthly Feast
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DA’s interventional stance constitutes an ‘anthropology by means of design’, whereby the researcher ‘moves forward with people in tandem with their desires and aspirations rather than looking back over times past’ (132). Rather than aiming for specific solutions or outcomes, DA is concerned with performing ways of knowing through collaborative and material entanglements. DA therefore supports ongoing questioning and improvisatory interventions, that are concerned with how
particular futures might emerge at specific sites, constituting possible alternatives to dominant perspectives.
DA married well with how I was situated within The Weekly Service, as an embedded design researcher. I worked intensively within a core team, consisting of Cam, Caro and Henry, who each brought skills from their own backgrounds in fields, such as evaluation, music, business development, strategic design and innovation. Our collaboration was initially anchored by a weekly meet-up at a city cafe in North Melbourne. My participation in these meetings was limited to begin with, as I was learning to appreciate the scope of discussion that had been ongoing between Cam, Henry and Caro for the four months prior. Central to this engagement was the intimacy of being involved in each others lives, and attending to how The Weekly Service was contributing in positive or negative ways towards what we each wanted to grow. Through those initial conversations, we built our capacity to make sense of what was emerging and develop the sociality which would continue to deepen our capacity to work together. In this ongoingly emergent environment, I produced materials that enabled me to document and reflect upon what was happening (to be discussed later in this chapter).
Within the core team, our working approach prioritised collective knowledge and the different and varied experiences of Cam, Henry, Caro and myself. As we worked we adapted existing tools and processes to facilitate knowledge production. For example, we regularly started our meetings with a check-in using a framework that allowed us to acknowledge how we were feeling physically, intellectually, emotionally and spiritually. Through processes like this, we sought to validate our ‘whole’ humanness and build closer bonds, while also acknowledging how those more invisible aspects of our experience influenced how we collaborated. For example, if I was having a difficult time coping with the uncertainty of the ecological crisis, then I could share that and also notice how this might influence how I perceived that The Weekly Service was not ‘doing enough’. By bringing emotional, intellectual, spiritual and physical aspects of our experience into awareness, we were more conscious of how these same aspects were influencing or driving our ways of designing as a core team.
Figure 9: A core team meeting With (left to right) Cam, myself, Henry & Caro from September 2016.
Over the course of this research over 100 Services were held. As a core team, we learnt and developed the Service through reflection-in- action (Schön 1983) and improvisation. Improvisation is a concept that has been developed within Anthropology (Hallam and Ingold 2007), Design Anthropology (Halse 2013, Hurtado 2018, Rolfstam & Buur 2012) and within design literature more broadly (Binder et al. 2011, Schön 1983). Gatt and Ingold (2013) suggest that design is not so much about innovation but improvisation, which requires ‘flexibility and foresight’ and highlights the ‘capacity of inhabitants to respond with precision to the ever-changing circumstances of their lives’ (136). Improvisation is not about creating entirely new things, but about ‘keeping life going’, by responding to the continual changing conditions of one’s environment (Hallam and Ingold 2007). This definition deliberately re- frames designing as something that everyone does and it captures how the core team worked to continuously improve and evolve the Service. Over time and as our work progressed, the core team turned towards developing long-term relationships with people who frequently attended the Services we ran. Many of these people chose to become members of The Weekly Service. As a core team, we cultivated collaborative capacities and trust by gathering in people’s homes over dinner, across cups of coffee, at picnics, and at member retreats (with 40+ people) which we held every 3 months. Sometimes these activities occurred 1:1 where we were involved in the mutual discovery of other’s interests and the potential for collaboration, on a project or a role that they might like to play (Emilson et al. 2014). I use the notion of infrastructuring (explored in more detail in Part 3 & 4 of this dissertation) to describe how the core team sought to build long-term relationships and ongoingly align people, spaces, and technologies towards the emergence of new practices, such as co-producing the Service, shaping the evolution of membership and The Weekly Service more broadly. I briefly outline here, why infrastructuring is relevant to the work of The Weekly Service in relation to how the concept has been used in Participatory Design.
Infrastructuring can be considered as a framework for thinking about design activities in more emergent terms (Karasti and Syrjänen 2004, Marttila & Botero 2017). In Participatory Design (PD), infrastructuring has been used to describe the long-term work of ‘aligning humans and non-human actors (technologies, resources, spaces) towards the emergence of new practices’ (Seravalli 2018, 3). Infrastructuring therefore, is a term used to describe the ongoing work of making and sustaining infrastructures. The use of the gerund, seeks to emphasise the processual nature of infrastructures, rather than their tangible manifestations.
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Many designers who have been concerned with infrastructures and infrastructuring in design, have largely worked within the field of information technologies. Within this field, designers are often required to negotiate nebulous and immaterial emergent digital infrastructures with groups of people, often over extended periods of time (Karasti, Baker, Millerband 2010). Information systems researchers, Star and Ruhleder (1996) describe the experience of designing a large-scale information infrastructure metaphorically as, ‘like building the boat you’re on while designing the navigation system and being in a highly competitive boat race with a constantly shifting finishing line’ (112). This evocative image carries with it the uncertainties imbued in designing emergently. For Star and Ruhleder (1996) infrastructures are made up of socio-material relationships that are often complex, concerned with power and continually changing. In other words, infrastructures never stand apart from the people who design, maintain and use them (Star and Bowker 2002).
In more recent Participatory Design research, designers are
increasingly working within local contexts to infrastructure outcomes that involve technology, but are not necessarily configured around an information technology project. For example, Hillgren and colleagues (2011) consider how living labs might be conceived of as a way of infrastructuring, aimed towards the assembling of heterogeneous ‘publics’ where designers are involved in playing a ‘matchmaker’ role within and across communities. Likewise, Participatory Designer Shana Agid’s (2016) work, reveals the ways in which local activism seeks to agitate against large-scale infrastructures such as the prison- industrial-complex, and re-imagine local infrastructures that are orientated towards increasing well-being and the capacities for
enacting self-determination. These projects highlight how Participatory Design activities are now often taking place outside of formal work environments and within situations where relationships are forged through shared commitments across extended time-frames (le Dantec and DiSalvo 2013, Saad-Sulonen et al. 2018).
Within this research, infrastructuring is a helpful concept to capture how the core team of The Weekly Service attempted to align people towards the emergence of shared practices and the tensions that emerged as a result. Here alignment is not so much concerned with clicking people into place, but more akin to how a flock of birds might fly together, where ongoing acts enable a group to move and stay together. Infrastructuring is also a useful concept as it enables me to talk about The Weekly Service as a social-material configuration that was always in formation. As a concept however, infrastructuring also
has limits. The term lacks specificity (Lee and Schmidt 2018) and it isn’t well equipped to be able to account for the many nuanced ways in which people relate to one another, which influences what they are able to design together. In this research therefore, I don’t attempt to build on infrastructuring as a concept, rather I draw on it to help structure my analysis of the work of The Weekly Service and my own practice transitions.