“We Are Actively Reaching Out to Different Organizations and Folks to Come in”: Collective Design of the Vancouver Tool Library Project

Abstract

This paper reports on a case study that describes the collective design process of the Vancouver Tool Library, a non-profit community service cooperative that provides tools to its members in the city of Vancouver. By using the theory of infrastructuring in relation to the theoretical framework publics (Le Dantec 2016), we describe the project through its confronted issues and the emerged work of infrastructuring in the project. We also reflect on the infrastructuring work and analyze the characteristics of the collective design in the Vancouver Tool Library project. On the one hand, this research highlights the aspects of the design process in which interaction designers can play a significant role and further support the collective design in a community-based project. On the other hand, applying the notion of infrastructuring to the collective design of community-based project provides an opportunity to extend the understanding of design toward a more dynamic and open-ended process where conflicts, standards, and adaptions are interwoven within an infrastructuring process.