This project situates itself within the discipline of participatory design and the tradition of social
design. Responding to the issue of agency (Binder et al., 2015) embedded within the design process, it considers how democratic measures within the process can be furthered by addressing the tensions of political representation, and power-relations that the issue of agency raises between actors in publics (Binder et al., 2015).
Numerous methods exist to prevent participatory design from becoming a mere end in itself, but most central to this project are thinging (Telier, 2011) and infrastructuring (Ehn et. al., 2014). Infrastructuring draws inspiration from Actor-Network-Theory (Latour, 2005) and serves to map the socio-material networks of the community in questions (Ehn, et al.,2014; Storni, 2015). Thinging provides a model for democratic, open-ended exploration (Binder et al., 2015.) grounded within the infrastructure (Telier, 2011). Further, this project has adapted an approach to research drawn from inventive sociology, termed inventive methods (Lury and Wakeford, 2012), through the use of creative methods responsive to the process. Within this project illustrations will be used as a research device.