Everyday Design with Surrounds: Rehearsing Alternatives Amid Urban Sociotechnical Changes

Paper Title

Everyday Design with Surrounds: Rehearsing Alternatives Amid Urban Sociotechnical Changes

Publication Info

• Topic area: Everyday design practices in urban sociotechnical contexts
• Keywords: Everyday design, surrounds, urban redevelopment, sociotechnical systems, HCI, improvisation, governance, infrastructure, political agency, ethnography

Background and Problem

• Problem / challenge: Existing HCI research often conceptualizes everyday design as grounded in materially stable and politically neutral "surroundings," overlooking ambiguous, layered, and politically charged spaces shaped by histories of exclusion and dispossession.
• Significance: Understanding how everyday design unfolds in contested and emergent spaces can reveal alternative ways of living and relating amid urban sociotechnical changes, offering new insights for HCI and design research.
• Motivation and related work: Prior work in HCI has focused on user-driven appropriation of artifacts and surroundings, often framed as either apolitical domestic practices or oppositional resistance. This paper addresses the gap by examining design practices in spaces that are ambiguous, layered, and politically entangled, drawing on Simone’s concept of "surrounds."

Solution

• Proposed approach: The paper introduces "surrounds" as a conceptual framework to understand everyday design as navigational and relational practices that emerge in the interstices of layered infrastructures and governance.
• Novelty:
  1. Reconceptualizing everyday design as a mode of rehearsing alternatives within unsettled and politically entangled surrounds.
  2. Highlighting the relational and provisional nature of design practices that escape dominant epistemological and methodological frameworks in HCI.
• Procedure and key techniques:
  • Conducted three years of multisited ethnographic fieldwork in New York City and Detroit.
  • Analyzed two vignettes: a reconfigured living room in Long Island City and a community garden in Eastside Detroit.
  • Employed situational analysis to map sociomaterial conditions, discourses, and relationships shaping these practices.

Results

• Concrete findings:
  • Everyday design emerges through ambiguous and layered spaces (surrounds), not as oppositional or apolitical acts but as navigational practices.
  • Examples include transforming a living room into a semi-public cultural space and cultivating a garden as a community resilience hub.
• Advantage over baselines:
  • Moves beyond binary framings of everyday design as either apolitical or oppositional, offering a nuanced understanding of design as relational and provisional.
  • Expands HCI’s analytical lens to include practices that are subtle, emergent, and situated in the gaps of formal systems.
• Experiments / evaluation:
  • Ethnographic methods included participant observation, interviews, and archival research.
  • Data were analyzed through situational mapping to reveal relationships between actors, infrastructures, and sociopolitical conditions.
• Limitations and future work:
  • The study focuses on two specific urban contexts, which may limit generalizability.
  • Future research could explore how surrounds evolve over time and across different sociotechnical systems.

Summary

This paper introduces the concept of "surrounds" to reconceptualize everyday design as navigational and relational practices that emerge in ambiguous, layered, and politically entangled urban spaces. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in New York City and Detroit, the authors illustrate how communities rehearse alternative ways of living through provisional and situated acts of design. By shifting from materially stable "surroundings" to fluid and contested "surrounds," the study expands HCI’s understanding of everyday design, emphasizing its potential to navigate and reconfigure sociotechnical systems. These findings invite HCI scholars to attend to the gaps, ambiguities, and relational dynamics of design practices that escape dominant frameworks.