Center for People & Infrastructures

Users of all kinds of infrastructures are increasingly asked to interact with the socio-technical systems that serve as the foundation for modern life. Web pages and cell phone apps allow new forms of human-infrastructure interaction with electronic toll roads, power companies, and Internet service providers. In these interactions users are asked to manage their consumption for the sake of frugality, environmental sustainability, or some other efficiency — but as the data available about our use increases it is not clear what should be represented and how these interactions should work. Center researchers are working to invent new metaphors and practices for the representation of infrastructure.

Project supported from the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research, via an In3 Grant.