Harvesting Light, Cultivating Care: Exploring Intermittence As Framework for Infrastructuring and Stewardship

In response to growing environmental concerns within the Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and Design communities, recent efforts in both industry and academia have focused on addressing the sustainability and environmental impact of technological interventions. This paper engages with this discourse by investigating the lived experiences of volunteers stewarding solar powered servers within the Solar Protocol experimental network, a distributed collaborative design provocation that merges creative practice, sustainable computing, ecological awareness, and community-based care. Through interview analysis, triangulated with additional data sources (observations, memos, communications, etc.), we examine how stewards of cyber-physical systems interdependent with built and natural environments across varied geographies confront and adapt to infrastructural intermittency. We foreground the sociotechnical dimensions involved in this reinfrastructuring process, as the system's design influences collective maintenance efforts. Our findings highlight how stewarding systems that are intermittently powered fosters stewards’ deeper understanding of infrastructural interdependencies and environmental rhythms, positioning intermittence as a generative framework for sustainable infrastructural awareness and adaptation.