Design Infrastructuring Toward A Utopian Economy

Heidaripour, Maryam

The political rhetoric of today economy has framed innovation as reproduced and reserved by specific people in specific locations. This framing has shaped the discourse of who is deserving and who is not deserving and gradually sets the foundation of social discrimination, inequality, and exploitation as part of the neoliberal economy. Given the claim that entrepreneurs are inventing the future, this paper envisions alternative futures in which performing economy contributes to socio-technical transformation. To that end, this paper focuses on two community- based initiatives in Chicago that their contribution to economy is not recognized due to incompatibility with mainstream narrative. In these counter-hegemonic exemplars, different but potentially related future-making practices occur; they are shifting the emphasize from individual entrepreneur to a collective economic development and moving forward the discussion of entrepreneurship to the kind of society and the kinds of citizens that it is creating. By conducting ethnographic study on these exemplars, patterns have emerged that are informative to design strategies for infrastructuring and socio-material negotiations.

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