How might we reconsider what infrastructure is, and how might we design it differently?
For example, what kinds of connectivity infrastructure would reflect the kinds of futures that people in the Orkney Islands might aspire to? How does that change we think about connectivity infrastructures elsewhere? What happens when ‘monument’, ‘sea’, and ‘stone’ are key components in infrastructure? What happens when ‘collaboration’ is required?
This online book, commissioned by Intel Labs, is a response to that question. It draws on my ethnographic research, around marine renewable energy in the Orkney islands, to consider how the future is imagined and made in everyday practice in the islands, an archipelago off the north-east coast of Scotland.
This online book is an intervention into what we think infrastructure is, and how it might be imagined and made differently. Inspired by conversations with anthropologists at Intel Labs, and with thanks to Dawn Nafus, in particular, who led the collaboration.
