Infrastructuring Sustainable and Equitable Solutions

Abstract

Traditionally, design had a focus on the built environment and how humans interact with it. However, contemporary challenges of equity, sustainability, and computation in health, mobility, food, finance, housing, and energy require design to refocus its attention on the systems that emerge from the complex and adaptive interconnectivity of humans and non-humans agents. These complex interactions between agents form the infrastructures that shape contemporary livelihoods, consequently governing how resources are appropriated, used, managed, exchanged, monetized, and disposed by different populations. Therefore, designing infrastructures for equitable and sustainable livelihoods has become the biggest challenge for designers in the twenty-first century. It requires the understanding of the interconnectivity of the built environment and humans as systems. In this lecture, we will discuss the role played by large organizations from multiple sectors — for profit, not for profit, and government — in designing equitable and sustainable infrastructures. Frameworks on how to interpret and design infrastructures will be presented with the goal of discussing strategies through which systems can be designed by a coalition of organizations. Projects and case studies developed at the IIT Institute of Design in the past five years will be used to illustrate how designers and large organizations are well positioned to drive impact by designing sustainable and equitable solutions powered by computation.