ABSTRACT
In social innovation, design practitioners work with participants to create configurable infrastructures that enable sustained collaboration. This reconceptualisation of design reflects the recognition that complex, intersecting problems need to be located within the socio-technical systems that generate and perpetuate them, and that they cannot be solved with conventional project time, tools, and methods. This also questions the typical conceptualisation of design as problem-solving, led by practitioners. We suggest that design practitioners can nurture the conditions for sustained collaboration that social innovation requires by locating projects within an array of situations, a reflexive reframing that emphasises contextual and relational factors, and foregrounding the role of learning environments. This has implications for practitioners, particularly when thinking about how to intervene, attend to positionalities and power relations, and adapt the project to the emerging circumstances. To explore how this shapes our practices, we share reflections on our efforts to infrastructure. This can be framed as an approach to design that emphasises the nurturing of sustained relations required for continuing design beyond project time, and thus focuses on building connections and capabilities to support collaboration. In so doing, we also share principles and provocations that we are developing to guide us through these efforts.
