Welcome to a K3 seminar with Alicia Smedberg, PhD student in Interaction Design, K3. The title of the talk is:

“Because we say so”: Democratic infrastructuring in the intersection between public and civil sectors.

It will take place on Wednesday, February 12 at 10.15-12.00 in the K3 Open Studio.

It will be Alicia’s 50 percent PhD seminar, and Ylva Gislen, Docent in Artistic Practice, will function as discussant. 

Below you will find an abstract for the seminar. If you would like to read Alicia’s draft document for the seminar, mail her (Alicia.Smedberg@mau.se).

Recall the feeling of beginning a sentence, in the heat of an argument, without quite know- ing how to finish it. This text is one such sentence, in the midst of things: urgent yet unfin- ished. The text is a result of two and a half years of participatory design practice situated within public sector work in Malmö and Lund, Sweden. The text also marks a milestone in a project with a Marxist-feminist theoretical framework, seeking to articulate the impera- tive of infrastructuring that is both pluralistic and sensitive to power imbalances. This has been framed around the initial question of how we, as participatory designers, can work with and around the issue of agency which arises the inter-sectional work between public and private sectors.

Following Hannah Arendt’s understanding of the public sphere and of politics as articulation and action, the project proposes an approach termed collaborative anecdotalization which, within infrastructuring processes, entails both the recognition of the individual perspective as well as the collaborative practice of building a shared worldview in disparate groups.