Reflexive account-giving through ‘practice notations’:: plural dimensions and dynamics of infrastructuring

Abstract

This paper takes contemporary infrastructuring discourses further to explore ways to notice, articulate, and learn from dynamic shifts that characterize contingent contexts of participatory designing. We explore the knowledge(s) that can emerge from generating understandings of movements in relation to changing conditions through the use of ‘practice notation’ in a long-term collaboration with an organization working to end the prison industrial complex in the US. Informed by dance notation, the project experimented through practices of inquiry that enabled understandings across multiple scales, from the local to the systemic, with a focus on how collectivity was imagined, built, challenged, and sustained. We consider how practice notations can complement dynamic accounts of infrastructuring by layering participants’ movement, ideas, and contexts to create new understandings of practice. In so doing, we commit to the ethics of providing richer and more grounded articulations of participatory practices-in-motion.