Here we explore some expansions of the principle of 'look and feel' in developing digital infrastructure.
We start with 'UX' and the principle of a workspace inside the browser, with tools in browser tabs.
We move to the field of digital tools as elements of practice in the life and work of communities: digitally mediated spaces of collective practice. This takes us beyond UX and UX design, to questions of collective intention and collective capability, and how digital tooling can be conducted within that kind of frame.
In turn this takes us to matters of design justice and design practice 'in society', in the commons. Way beyond 'UX design'. Solidarity, collaborating, federating - Beyond UX
# Tools in browser tabs
Guerrilla Translations thought carefully about their workflow as a collective (document production, is what they do), and the way that the toolset is available to each person in their own workspace; they're a distributed collective. They adopted the working principle that 'Your browser is your workspace'.
Your workflow or my workflow might not be the same as theirs (although using **the browser** fluently is probably basic, when working with tools in the Cloud, handling *distributed digital materials*), but I think the attention they've given to this is something every movement organisation needs to be able to mobilise, to be able to deal with. Basic literacy.
*Glorified as UX design?* A few years on, these matters have been glorified as UX: user experience. Whatever: the relationship of fluent to-hand handling, between whatever tools we decide we need in our toolstack, on whatever devices we use, is key. This is one place that commercial assemblages of tools like Google Workspace or Microsoft 365 score: the toolstack is organised under one umbrella, with a consistent interface. Tools assembled ad hoc - either FLOSS tools running on your device or platformed tools running in browser tabs - can be at odds with each other in how they work and how they look and how they compete with each other for screen real estate on your device.
So: in the 'toolstack' layer of the real full stack, one of the central concerns - along with which tools are needed for a collective of people to fluently do what they do together - is how fluenty the tools make themselves available on the devices that people routinely use: the **affordances** that they furnish in practice. Given that many people routinely use phones rather than laptops or desktops, this challenge has a particular edge to it. The phone, the laptop and the big screen
# Digital tools as an element of community life & work There's a siginificant, politicised need to broaden 'look and feel', and the narrow professionalised technician-artisan field of UX design. It's helpful to keep in mind the broader, more politicised sense of 'participatory design' in the field of human-computer interacion. It is at least a step further away from the mundane hacking of apps for mobile devices?
Being involved in contra-infrastructuring, we need to be able to engage - in a practical way - the entire practical, inhabited, embodied relationship between **actors in communities** (aka commons) and material **elements of tech**. It's a special case of the general relationships of 'material culture': the practical, always-already-ongoing and situationally negotiated working plural relationship **between people and people and stuff**.
We'd better not forget about affordance, as a basic concept. Affordances are what people **find** and practically, opportunistically, contextually mobilise and seize upon in the everyday world, as they routinely inhabit it; as distinct from what designers or companies or platforms or services intentionally and explicitly **offer**. Affordance
# A design approach Here's a process of reasoning and conceptualising, for a design approach to a practice of contra-infrastructuring: - We start from digitally mediated 'spaces' for collective practice in communities. Digitally mediated spaces - We move from there to 'layers' of (contra-) infrastructure as layers of digitally mediated practice (aka spaces). And we understand these to be commons, with memberships, principles, protocols, privileges and obligations. Infrastructure as layered space Everything in the commons - This takes to us contra-infrastructuring. Contra-infrastructure(ing); and thus into . . - What a 'stack' of projects might be, for a Democratic Tech Fund, engaged in the facilitation of contra-infrastructuring. *It's not a stack of apps*. It's a stack of **scope in civil society capability**, in provisioning and sustaining digitally mediated spaces in the commons. A real full stack
Along the way we need to cultivate a sense of: - **Tools and where to find them**:what a digital tool is, as an element of a digitally-mediated space; and a sense of the world in which such tools are made and curated FLOSS tools and FLOSS society; and - **Work practice**: what the 'tech' operations and other operational practices involved in maintaining a digitally mediated space need to be. An organisational scheme for developing & sustaining digital infrastructure
Oh . . and in all of this we need to mobilise a clear understanding of **design justice**, as the key to organising and enacting design practice. Design justice . . coupled with a methodology for **collaborative design**: - design of digital infrastructure projects Projects in DTF; and - design of digital infrastructures. Collaborative desgn practice
# A politics of design Have we got far enough away yet, from the professionalised practice of UX design? We'll see - in practice! Tangles, confusions and contradictions **will** arise. We're at work here, in-and-with-and-against the professional-managerial class.
We can expect these to be interwoven with the tangles, confusions and contradictions of working in both **the public sphere** - for example, with municipalities and other administrations of the local, regional and national state - and **the commons**. Public? Common? A politics
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