Background

Infrastructural upheaval

We are living in a period of infrastructural upheaval: the social media and news landscape continues to fracture, scholarly communication infrastructures are straining under the combined weight of a labor crisis and a wave of AI slop, and open source projects are threatened by a surge of low-quality AI contributions, funding crises, and emerging cybersecurity risks associated with the rise of AI coding agents. What infrastructures will replace what is currently being broken?

As a design-oriented field, CSCW is well-positioned to contribute to the design and development of the infrastructural technologies that will operate in these spheres for the next 20 years and beyond. Infrastructure studies within CSCW and HCI has foregrounded the sociotechnical nature of infrastructure [12], conflicting or incongruent design imperatives [11], and the human infrastructure [7] necessary to stand up information infrastructure. But how do we, as research-informed designers and scholars, take on an active role in sociotechnical systems design when we are mainly working on the small scale? What does it mean to design a component or an application, but with a commitment toward infrastructural functioning? Some systems are too expansive or complicated or hierarchical for us to have substantially more power than other stakeholders; in large endeavors, designers and design researchers are considered service providers [6]. How can we help to preserve and enable the social interactions that are necessary for creativity and community? What does it mean to design a component or an application, but with an openness or goal of expansion toward infrastructure?

Collaborative sociotechnical ecologies

20+ years of infrastructure studies in SIGCHI [9] have demonstrated repeatedly that “infrastructure” is not a monolith — therefore, it cannot be studied, designed, or developed as such. A promising direction is to investigate the collaborative sociotechnical ecologies that are necessary for designing, creating, using, maintaining, and repairing infrastructural tools, systems, and applications.

Collaborative ecologies are diffuse, often networked, assemblages of collaborators, data, and technologies that are necessary to create infrastructure in the first place, and also to make use [4] of the affordances of infrastructure post-development. Rather than only a team of teams, system of systems, or project of projects, collaborative ecologies encompass various types and sizes of sociotechnical assemblages. They can be considered to be supportive and pre-, post-, and during infrastructure [10].

Most of us will primarily be working on designing, developing, or studying one application, platform, or software pipeline, while some human-centered designers/researchers may be hopping between sites across a larger whole. We endeavor to put together our different perspectives and viewpoints to “see” ecologically, while making clear the analytical and pragmatic “cuts” that are typically necessary to define and undertake design interventions [6, 8].

From inversion to eversion

A design-oriented frame for infrastructure could extend and complement the analytical method of infrastructural inversion [1, 2] that has been so productive in infrastructure studies to date. Infrastructural inversion is a reversal of attention that foregrounds that which is otherwise backgrounded, or brings to the surface that which is buried.

We extend this tradition by suggesting that proactive design-oriented consideration of infrastructure might support a complementary kind of reversal: not inversion, but eversion. In anatomical terms, an inversion involves a turn toward the midline of the body, while an eversion is a turn away from the midline. Analytically, if infrastructural inversion prompts us to look deeper within systems to reveal phenomena obscured by more obvious objects of attention, infrastructural eversion prompts us to turn outward from those systems to explore what lies beyond our field of vision. Inversion draws forth things that are hidden; eversion draws connections between things that are not typically understood to be in relation.

On the one hand, eversion can mean forming conceptual linkages between phenomena that we already understand to be infrastructural and phenomena that do not necessarily fit inside that frame, prompting complementary questions:

• We know that locked-in systems coerce the world into particular shapes [3], but how do ones that fail to launch set off ripples that can be equally consequential?
• We know that the maintenance and repair of durable systems often requires herculean exertion [5], but what of the effort that goes into the subversion, refusal, or dismantlement of systems?
• We know how to describe the accomplishment of coordination and planning, but what about the achievement of spontaneity and surprise [7]?

On the other hand, eversion also means forming new relations between actors who work on, in, for, and against disparate but increasingly interdependent systems — seeking new solidarities, exchanging hard-won insights, and exploring novel potentialities. As the scales and stakes of infrastructural entanglement grow, so too does the urgency of these connections — not merely as an academic exercise, but as a practical response to challenges that no single system, discipline, or community can address alone. Eversion, in this sense, is not only an analytical posture but an ethical one: it calls us to build the collaborative sociotechnical ecologies we need.

Who this is for

The foundations for this stream of research preceded SIGCHI. The past and current infrastructure corpus extends well beyond SIGCHI to other CSCW venues and to additional fields including and beyond Information Science, Science and Technology Studies (STS), Software Studies, Data Science, and Team Science, among others.

This workshop welcomes individuals who may not identify as CSCW researchers or developers. This includes practitioners and developers actively working on infrastructure — including but not limited to “metascience entrepreneurs,” communities of builders in the Fediverse and AT Protocol social media ecosystems, and more.

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