Interaction, Integration, Interconnectivity, and Iteration: A New Model for Designing Infrastructure Change

Abstract

The ongoing Covid-19 pandemic has highlighted the obsolescence of the infrastructures we rely on in our everyday lives. Since the Industrial Revolution, design and public health have taken parallel journeys towards creating everyday infrastructures that condition how people access and use different types of resources to improve their well-being. Design has predominantly helped organizations utilize resources to create systems of offerings that influence people’s activities. Public health, on the other hand, has focused on influencing the allocation of resources for the common good by applying scientific and technical expertise. In this article, I introduce the Four-I model—interaction, integration, interconnectivity, and iteration—as a new resource-based view model that brings together knowledge from diverse fields, including design and public health. This model presents four attributes concerning resource flows: interactions among diverse agents, integration of multiple systems, interconnectivity between organizational levels, and iteration over time. Each attribute entails a guiding question and a related framework useful for designing everyday infrastructures. After illustrating its application in bike-sharing systems, I conclude by showing how using the model expands design knowledge and supports organizations in promoting well-being.

Introduction

From time to time, pandemics have promoted paradigm shifts in how we live, learn, work, and play. Such global public health crises have been characterized by high levels of uncertainty, creating atmospheres where people often searched more for relevant questions than definitive answers. Over the years, pandemics have sparked the development of new approaches to deal with unprecedented complexity. In turn, these developments have benefited from greater openness towards investing in initiatives that have been audacious in their purpose and exploratory at their core.

We see a repeat of these conditions in the current Covid-19 pandemic, where the obsolescence of many infrastructures we rely on in our diverse everyday lives has been highlighted. Infrastructures are the underlying systems that provide or prevent access to and use of various resources, enabling the flow of people and things through daily individual and organizational activities.1 Infrastructures have historically been considered technical systems to be carefully planned, designed, and managed by knowledge developed in technology-driven disciplines, such as civil engineering and urban planning.2

Infrastructures that support everyday activities, including mobility, communications, water, coastal management, energy, and sewerage systems, all have subsystems that are parts, or components, designed for specific functions within a broader, defined goal.3 Some of these infrastructural components have been created for little to no user interaction and remain predominantly invisible to people’s daily experiences. Examples include railway tracks, weather databases, airspace policies, underground electric grids, and water pipes. Others are more visible and have become primary touchpoints through which people and organizations interact with each other, the infrastructure itself, and the surrounding environment. Train cars, subway maps, emergency homes for natural disaster recovery, drones, cellphones, traffic lights, and hydrants are a few examples of visible components providing or restricting access to and use of diverse resources. Together, invisible and visible infrastructural components have resulted from resource-intensive investment efforts intended to provide broad public value for decades, if not centuries.

Infrastructural design has evolved to follow a linear, step-by-step process.4 Conventionally, planning teams thought first to identify the demand for a new public service (e.g., access to clean water), then quantify this demand (e.g., the quantity of water people use per day, likelihood of population increase, availability of clean water in reservoirs, and cost per liter), followed by the design and implementation of invisible elements according to the predicted demand (e.g., length, diameter, and distribution of the water pipes and pumps). They would then accommodate standardized visible elements accordingly (e.g., faucets, water fountains). The process usually was constrained by available technology for building the invisible elements and standardizing the visible parts. It also assumed that everyday activities, market dynamics, production operations, distribution channels, natural resources, and implementation processes were all roughly stable. But what happens when all these factors are constantly changing?

Technological advances, such as large-scale sensors, data collection systems, and increased computational capacities, are giving rise to a new conceptual approach to infrastructure design. This approach is one in which scale, scope, and speed are not determined during planning by detailed predictions of invisible components and the selection of standardized visible components. Under this new approach, infrastructural development revolves around expanding and adopting flexible, modular systems that integrate invisible and visible components at their core. This type of modularity goes beyond the parts themselves5 to embrace the intersections between them, as well as between the resulting modules and other systems in place. Bike-sharing programs, social media platforms, autonomous clean water appliances, alternative visual distress signals for boat navigations, solar-powered microgrids, renewable energy packages, off-grid installations for increasing disaster resilience, and connected septic tanks are a few examples of how this type of modular system design can broaden the ways in which organizations approach infrastructural interventions. A consequence of this expansion is a change in how stakeholders use infrastructures, or access and use resources through everyday activities. Consequently, this affects how they perceive problems and opportunities around their well-being.

In this article, I present historical precedents of this modular understanding of systems, starting in the Industrial Revolution. This was a time when design and public health evolved in parallel to create everyday infrastructures that continue to determine how currently people access and use resources to improve their well-being. Then I situate this conceptual approach toward infrastructures as an opportunity for converging knowledge from design and public health in the present day. Finally, I introduce the Four-I model—interaction, integration, interconnectivity, and iteration—as a new resource-based approach that brings together knowledge from diverse fields, including design and public health. The model presents four attributes concerning resource flows: interactions among diverse agents, integration of multiple systems, interconnectivity between organizational levels, and iteration over time. After illustrating the model’s application in bike-sharing systems, I conclude by showing how the model expands design knowledge and can support organizations in promoting well-being.

This work advances a broad agenda on design for well-being that considers the health, happiness, and prosperity of people, organizations, and the natural environment.6 This approach aligns with others working in infrastructure studies in recognizing the importance of subjective and objective factors in holistically determining living standards.7

Parallel Journeys

During the Industrial Revolution, a cholera outbreak in the United Kingdom coincided with the fast-moving, seismic forces of urbanization, rapid technological advancement, and the rise of the middle class. The outbreak catalyzed the development of new questions, frameworks, and methods that helped individuals and organizations understand unprecedented complexity and build a foundation for better futures.

The unusual and ambitious yet rigorous contributions of activists such as John Snow,8 Edwin Chadwick,9 Florence Nightingale,10 William Edward Burghardt Du Bois,11 and William Worrall Mayo12 helped government officials, industrialists, and politicians move beyond antiquated notions of health as an aspect of moral and spiritual conditions, to embrace social and environmental indicators of illness and cleanliness. Once a new understanding of the problem was consolidated, more effective interventions could be designed.

As the body of knowledge influencing public health expanded, so did infrastructural developments. Charles-Edward Amory Winslow13 called this period “the great sanitary awakening,” when most interventions were shifted to being designed through the technical lens of health and safety and primarily informed by principles of functionality and efficiency. The new public health imperative of sanitation also advanced the ways that private organizations and investors approached and assumed responsibility for people’s well-being. The first public flush toilet was invented by George Jennings and was exhibited and used for the first time during the 1851 Crystal Palace Great Exhibition in London (Figure 1 ).14 Known as the Monkey Closet, this modular system incorporated both visible and invisible components, and rapidly grew to influence everyday activities involving hygiene at the population level.

Figure 1.

George Jennings’s public toilet, 1851. Source: Liza Picard, “The Rise of Technology and Industry,” British Library, October 14, 2009, https://www.bl.uk/victorian-britain/articles/the-rise-of-technology-and-industry.

The widespread adoption of public toilets was driven by novel interactions among diverse agents (e.g., urban dwellers, public organizations, and their surrounding environment).15 At the same time, the integration of multiple systems took place (e.g., real estate investments, urban development, sanitation, and public parks). Together these constituted new ways for people to access and use diverse resources, and ways for organizations to design infrastructures.16

Alongside many other contributions from the latter half of the 19th century (for example, the 1851 Exhibition Model Dwellings by Prince Albert), the Monkey Closets were an early example of designers working in parallel with science-driven public health experts to make advances in creating modular infrastructural components that shaped new activities of daily life. Such contributions also resulted in changes in production systems and consumption markets. Most of the modular systems designed at that time responded to emerging questions around individual and environmental well-being, organizational values, market dynamics, and politics in government initiatives to bring about paradigm shifts in infrastructure planning and design. This movement was forward-looking; the goal was to generate alternative futures, rather than to benchmark past successes. There was a broader social project ahead: exploring ways to create the conditions for well-being in the fast-growing, dynamic urban environments into which many people were moving.

Everyday Infrastructures

Since the Industrial Revolution, organizations have become the primary agents advancing and deploying expertise from the fields of design and public health. The rapid development of new technology, creative business models, and production capabilities allowed organizations to design modular systems that became part of everyday infrastructures and significantly shifted how individuals and organizations accessed and used diverse resources. Perhaps one of the most emblematic contributions of this type was the production and distribution of Henry’s Ford 1908 Model T automobile. Ford transformed mobility for millions of people who previously could not have imagined owning a car.17 Ford developed a modular system that simplified jobs, paid assembly line workers twice the normal salary, and established a dealership network that rapidly increased the scale of distribution.18 This modular system was dependent on the interconnectivity between organizational levels to reshape how companies worked, from strategy to operations to product design.

A less examined project from an everyday infrastructure viewpoint is the 1926 iconic work of Austrian designer Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky. She conducted interviews, time-motion studies, and observations of the daily activities of middle-class women. At that time, middle-class women would spend most of their day in the kitchen on household chores like cooking and laundry.19 Common to their experiences was the physical strain and mental drudgery from various aspects of kitchen design. Examples include lack of proper ventilation, components inadequately installed in places hard to reach, and spatial distribution that did not account for daily activity workflows.20 A lack of storage space and refrigeration, for example, meant women would have to make several grocery trips to avoid wasting food and money. Consequently, middle-class women found themselves constrained by a lack of resources like time and physical health.

In response to this problem, Schütte-Lihotzky created the Frankfurt Kitchen (Figure 2 ),21 a low-cost, modular set of components that could be assembled in several ways according to the spatial particulars of each household and to the individual needs and preferences of those using the kitchen. Examples of visible components included a gas stove, sliding doors to the dining room, built-in storage, a garbage cabinet, a foldable ironing board, a sink, and a workspace in front of a window. Schütte-Lihotzky’s goal was to improve women’s lives by creating the conditions for increased efficiency in their daily work. She combined measurable, scientific work with observational methods and projected that, if implemented in large housing projects, her design could reduce the time women spent on chores from 15 hours to 5 on a laundry day.22

Figure 2.

Frankfurt Kitchen, 1926.

Schütte-Lihotzky’s Frankfurt Kitchen is recognized by scholars across gender, feminist, and technology studies as a conundrum. While representing a milestone in the struggle for women’s personal and economic independence, it also illustrates the need for new lenses and approaches to counteract a technological utopianism that amplifies systemic social inequities through rationalized interventions.23 The extra hours freed up by the Frankfurt Kitchen were soon reallocated to other household chores. With the fundamentally regressive conceptualization of women’s labor being iterated over time, the emancipatory project of reinventing the kitchen unintentionally reasserted the association between women and the domestic sphere.24

The Model T Ford and the Frankfurt Kitchen are examples of 20th-century modular systems that became everyday infrastructures. By gaining widespread adoption across society, the influence of these systems permeated people’s daily lives and expanded access to a variety of resources, such as time, raw materials, new beliefs, knowledge, and technology. Such impact created new conditions for people to achieve their aspirations for well-being.

Similar Interests, Different Approaches

The fields of design and public health are both concerned with improving people’s well-being but are characterized by different approaches. Design focuses on helping organizations across sectors make products that solve specific problems in people’s lives.25 Public health focuses on the common good, predominantly through hypothesis-driven efforts that inform the development, formalization, and application of scientific medical knowledge and technical expertise.26

A foundational contribution to the formalization of public heath’s body of knowledge was made in 1662 by John Graunt, who deployed inductive reasoning and statistical analysis to identify patterns across living conditions in an aggregated database on mortality.27 His publication Natural and Political Observations upon the Bills of Mortality was a landmark for the adoption of health statistics in the planning and implementation of health services. According to Theodore Tulchinsky and Elena Varavikova, his work “established the sciences of demography and vital statistics and methods of analysis, providing basic measurements for health status evaluation with mortality rates by age, sex, and location.”28 While often controversial and sparked by misfortunes like war, diseases, financial crisis, and natural disasters, the advances that followed these events allowed public health to expand its body of knowledge, incorporating expertise from domains such as behavioral economics and establishing evidence-based approaches and schematic patterns of behavior that continue to influence population-level policy.29

Smoke-free laws, for example, were started by a small group of politicians and decision-makers who began paying closer attention to civic and institutional manifestations against “smoke anywhere and at any time” attitudes. It did not take long for them to become aware of available knowledge on the health consequences, social discord, and environmental impact of the tobacco industry.30 Beginning with the Minnesota Clean Indoor Air Act of 1975, smoke-free laws became a component of a public health infrastructure that transformed human behavior globally in a matter of decades.31

Despite significant advances in public health and its expanding knowledge, disparities remain in relation to the burden of tobacco use in different subpopulations.32 This may be seen where persistent, seemingly intractable behavioral challenges undermine the ability of infrastructural interventions to improve lives, especially among low-wealth and marginalized populations. Access to clean water and sanitation in remote villages,33 housing deficits in large urban areas,34 and road traffic accidents35 are a few other examples where it is difficult to account for the full spectrum of behavioral variables in public health. Nevertheless, while hard to account for, behavioral-related variables at play can reflect powerful contextual forces influencing everyday activities.

Convergence Opportunity

Public health is a volatile field as it must deal with a number of determinants that influence well-being. This volatility is similar to any other field dealing with interactions among diverse agents, integration of multiple systems, interconnectivity of organizational levels, and generating interventions that must go through iterations over time. A convergence between design and public health knowledge is not a substitute for current approaches in any of these fields. Instead, it is an ambitious goal to augment expertise in creating more holistic infrastructural interventions fit to 21st-century complexity.

Since the 19th century, scholars in infrastructure studies have advanced conceptual framings around the hard and soft dimensions of infrastructures. Predominantly informed by knowledge from engineering and the natural sciences, the hard dimensions of infrastructure cover the tangible aspects of an intervention. They result from technical and technological design efforts leveraging available resources to de-risk decision-making concerning visible and invisible components. The sources of information and other resources tend to be stable and accurate, making it possible to define the scale, scope, and speed of these efforts. Examples of hard dimensions studies include research into materials and construction techniques for subways and aqueducts, renewable energy technology for powering agricultural irrigation systems in low-income countries, and vaccine distribution logistics.

Soft dimensions fall within the domain of social scientists and describe the intangible aspects of infrastructural interventions. They deal with fast-changing, often incomplete information about the various ways in which the interactions among diverse stakeholders are shaped by the access and use of resources conditioned by the systems in place.36 A recent case showed how informal social networks in high-density, low-wealth settlements in Brazil were more effective in reducing the rate of Covid-19 spread than the formal approaches taken in high-density, wealthy neighborhoods in the same cities.37

While Paul Edwards38 has recognized that the hard dimensions of infrastructures were the means through which society advanced, their stable, technical elements pose significant barriers to accommodating the soft aspects of contemporary daily life activities. There is a growing body of work evidencing the frictions between past decisions about resource allocation against today’s problems, and tomorrow’s aspirations.39

For instance, low-wealth and marginalized populations living in the South Side of the City of Chicago are in great need of access to nutritious food.40 The city’s infrastructure, however, was not designed to accommodate urban food production practices. According to Sheila Castillo and her colleagues,41 a lack of institutional flexibility in policy design processes poses barriers to the adaptation of existing zoning to enable urban agriculture and community gardens. Likewise, a lack of budgetary resources limits the development of urban soil regeneration programs, and initiatives connecting local production to consumption markets lead to increased risk when scaling up farming operations.42 In the absence of the necessary choice infrastructure to create well-being solutions for themselves,43 individuals and communities are limited in their ability to utilize the resources offered by modern infrastructures, both hard and soft.

The lack of access to healthy soil and nutritious, affordable produce in urban environments not only prevents marginalized populations from meeting their dietary needs but also places them at higher risk of obesity and non-communicable diseases.44 The general increase in cases of high blood pressure, diabetes, cardiac conditions, and other dietary-related diseases across the United States has reached a scale that necessitates interventions in how resources are accessed and used in not only food systems but also other systems that influence health outcomes, such as ecological restoration, healthcare, financial, transportation, communication, and education systems.45

The situation described above exemplifies how social inequity, ecological degradation, and economic disparity are increasingly challenging centuries-old conventional knowledge about infrastructure design. As Dennis Rodgers and Bruce O’Neill46 noted, Susan Leigh Star47 was a leading voice in infrastructure studies who argues that infrastructures are simultaneously ecological and relational. She draws from design and social science in her work. Star’s work has inspired sociologists, geographers, and anthropologists who have in turn expanded the theoretical background of conceptual dimensions relating tangible and intangible aspects in infrastructure studies to embed social, cultural, and political facets in their design. Contributions stemming from Star’s work have also led to new interpretations in infrastructural design practice concerning the appearance of infrastructural components. For example, the concept of infrastructural inversion supported design practices that brought to the surface components conventionally hidden from the users, such as water pipes.48 As shown in Figure 3 , advances in infrastructural studies and practice can fit into a structure relating conceptual dimensions and the appearance of infrastructure components.

Figure 3.

Conceptual dimensions and appearance of infrastructure components. The image presents examples across four industries from the viewpoint of the end user. © 2022 André Nogueira.

More recently, advances in the conceptual dimensions and appearance of everyday infrastructures have touched contemporary work on platform studies.49 The enriching debate about infrastructures and platforms suggests, much like in “the great sanitary awakening,” a shift from singular-point solutions to integrative infrastructural innovation is necessary to promote well-being. New questions ought to be raised so that new approaches can be developed.

Public health leaders recognize they must embrace more flexible ways of dealing with health and the need to integrate different forms of evidence if their work is to overcome seemingly intractable contemporary problems.50 If the body of knowledge in public health is expanded to encompass the daily activities of people and organizations, then infrastructural developments will follow. Likewise, experienced designers recognize that manifestations of various socio-ecological-technical forces (e.g., increased awareness of social inequities, growing ecological literacy, and changing consumption patterns) are sparking paradigm shifts by changing the context of how people live their lives, as well as how organizations plan and operate.51 Patrick Whitney52 has also pointed out this limiting condition in available knowledge; he argues that there is an urgent need for “frameworks that let us face forward to get a clearer view of the social and economic dimensions of our future world, and especially how they might interact with emerging technologies.” While existing knowledge in public health and design may contribute to new approaches for infrastructure design, neither field has a comprehensive understanding of the underlying connectivity between abstract factors driven by everyday activities and concrete factors driven by technology and economics.

Pressing social, ecological, and technological forces will continue to shape well-being. It thus becomes increasingly important to develop new approaches connecting scientific advances from public health with the know-how from design when creating infrastructural interventions to improve people’s everyday lives. The urgent demand for creating new choice infrastructure that expands the way populations access and use resources in behavioral change processes (e.g., better eating habits) rather than solving for a specific public health problem embedded in current choice architecture (e.g., weight loss) has been recognized in work at the intersection of fields such as public policy, design, and behavioral economics.53 Importantly, this shift presents an opportunity for organizations to explore new infrastructure design approaches and prototype alternative futures they may promote.

A New Model for Everyday Infrastructures

Infrastructures that work properly present a set of standards and protocols for how their soft and hard dimensions work together in providing access and supporting use of diverse recourses.54 Awareness of these properties motivated designers’ interest in reconceptualizing modern approaches to infrastructural design through participatory design practices. This practice suggests an expansion of design outcomes from what (artifacts) to when (process), engaging a broader range of stakeholders as co-creators, and anticipating some of the consequences of patterns of human activity and adding a crucial element of temporality.55

Over the last decade, I have conducted research across sectors and countries with several collaborators and organizations, expanding this practice to consider how the hard and soft dimensions of infrastructures condition human and non-human lives by facilitating or inhibiting resource access and use. In this article, I focus on three collaborations I developed at different geographic and organizational levels between 2016 and 2019. All three helped me explore how practitioners could embed principles of sustainability and equity into assembling visible and invisible components of infrastructural interventions that integrate considerations from their hard and soft dimensions.56 In each project, I took the role of an experienced designer working with a key partner and collaborating with diverse stakeholders embedded within the context. Along with these local agents, I worked with scholars from different disciplines, including but not limited to sociology, public policy, industrial ecology, business, management, environmental science, and public health.

The first project was located at the facility level and focused on cultivating local circular economy practices at The Plant with partner Plant Chicago.57 The second project, located at the municipal level, focused on exploring food waste as a path for co-designing sustainable food systems in Chicago with our partner, the Chicago Food Policy Action Council.58 The third project, with the regional-level partner organization Calumet Collaborative, was focused on investigating the redevelopment of brownfields and their potential for regeneration of the Calumet Region.59

The different teams assembled in each of these projects were all exposed to complex situations in which available knowledge about how to design products, environments, services, interactions, and strategies seemed limited, especially regarding how the flows of different types of resources supported well-being. As multidisciplinary teams engaged in complex challenges, we were constrained by the infrastructures shaping resource access and use. In some cases, available resources were only accessible to a certain subset of stakeholders involved in an exclusive social infrastructure around technical knowledge and financial resources (e.g., philanthropies pursuing their agendas through funding the work of well-known faculty). In others, agents involved in the process lacked the political influence to promote desirable outcomes (e.g., the creation of new waste management infrastructure, city-wide composting services, or new strategies for brownfields redevelopment).

A resource-based view of complex systems is in widespread use across disciplines. Transaction cost economics helps organizations decide whether to internalize or outsource a capability based on the costs and levels of specific exchanges.60 In contrast, the resource-based view rests on the understanding that an organization is a collection of resources and assets. These resources and assets can be strategically combined to create distinct value and competitive or collaborative advantage.61 As far as finance is concerned, trades involve the exchange of money for assets. Manufacturers and developers must manage supply chain flows. To do this, they rely on resource-based theory to make decisions regarding their organizational boundaries and processes. They use flow models to understand the exchange of information between the sender and the receiver. Social scientists map stocks or activities related to a single type of resource or map how particular interventions impact the flow of various resources. In my research, I have not come across designers utilizing a resource-based view approach to support well-being.

Together with colleagues involved in the three projects presented above, I created the Innovation Lenses framework to help multidisciplinary teams consider the flow of eight different types of resources when formulating criteria for future interventions (see Table 1 ).62 These resources were further organized into three categories of capital: Social (human, social, cultural, political), Ecological (natural), and Technical (financial, manufactured, digital).

Table 1.

Innovation Lenses Framework (adapted from Nogueira et al., 2019).

SOCIAL
HUMAN	SOCIAL	CULTURAL	POLITICAL
The ability and capability of individuals to produce and manage their well-being. These include individual human being’s health, knowledge, skills, and motivation.	The professional and social connections among agents. These include partnerships, collaborations, and informal gatherings.	Values, beliefs, and attitudes underlying patterns of behavior that are tolerated, encouraged or discouraged by individuals, communities, or organizations.	Governing structures in organizations that determine how decisions are made and how power is distributed. Such structures involve hierarchy, inclusion, equity, transparency, access, and participation.
ECOLOGICAL	TECHNICAL
NATURAL	FINANCIAL	MANUFACTURED	DIGITAL
It comprises natural resources, both renewable and nonrenewable. It also includes fauna and flora, as well as their life-supporting systems.	The productive power in the resources of other types of capital. It includes the resources and assets of an individual or entity translated into the form of a currency that can be accessed, owned, or traded.	All material goods, including human-made elements such as physical infrastructures, roads, artefacts, and machines.	Digital infrastructures and data. These include digital platforms, the mechanisms of data collection, analysis, and storage.

After applying the Innovation Lenses framework to the three projects mentioned above and to other complex projects, we consolidated four infrastructural attributes concerning resource flows into the Four-I model (see Figure 4 ):

• •Interactions among diverse agents: helps examine why resources are flowing in a certain way, considering the underlying organizational arrangement and the functions different agents assume in promoting or hindering the flow of resources within the ecosystem;
• •Integration of multiple systems: helps locate the key drivers and barriers of resource flow by mapping correlations between variables across various systems influencing the behavior of people, organizations, and the natural environment;
• •Interconnectivity between organizational levels: helps systematize and cohere understanding of how resources flow within and across micro-, meso-, and macro-system levels; and
• •Iteration over time: helps anticipate unintended consequences when exploring future opportunities to improve well-being by considering patterns of prioritization in access and use of resources in past choices.

Figure 4.

The Four-I model. © 2022 André Nogueira.

The model shown in Figure 4 presents a set of guiding questions, each with a related framework that is useful for strategically and pragmatically organizing content related to resource flow in infrastructural interventions. Some existing design methods can help gather relevant content to be fed into these frameworks (such as pattern finding, user and field observation, participant observation, systems mapping, co-designing, and prototyping, among others). There is also a set of methods under development that have yet to be codified into the model (including intersecting stories, identifying variables, situating action, mapping assets, and visualizing resource flows).

The current Four-I model has helped multidisciplinary teams working with complex infrastructural challenges critically analyze and creatively design interventions through a resource-based approach, with and without my involvement. The model can be used descriptively to visualize, analyze, and communicate existing infrastructural interventions and provide an integrated means for understanding resource flows in a given situation. It does so by revealing several crucial matters, including organizational arrangements sustaining resource flows, positive and negative dynamics resulting from these flows, the governance structure undergirding how resources get accessed and used, and the historical evolution of how resources are activated and mobilized. The Four-I can also be used prescriptively to explore future interventions. It can be used to indicate how redirecting specific flows can improve or hinder well-being. Using the model descriptively and prescriptively has allowed team members to integrate diverse disciplinary perspectives and expand their perceptions of the issues and opportunities to promote population-level behavioral change. Teams have used this new understanding to explore, discuss, and make iterative changes to infrastructural interventions.

In the following section, I present bike-sharing systems as an example of a contemporary infrastructural intervention. The goal is to illustrate how the Four-I offers a resource-based view approach that expands the ability of multidisciplinary teams to confront complexity and improve well-being.

Case Study

As a relatively new modality of urban mobility, bike-sharing is a contemporary infrastructural intervention intended to set new conditions for improving well-being. This new infrastructure has been widely adopted in large cities worldwide, including Sao Paulo, Mexico City, New York, Chicago, Barcelona, Rome, Cape Town, Shanghai, Paris, and Tokyo. People have become accustomed to unlocking bikes from dock stations through wireless payments and riding on dedicated bike lanes guided by navigation maps. Their experience is made possible by the seamless interactions among diverse agents that participate in coordinated arrangements of organizations across systems, including mobility, finance, safety, and regulations across systems. These agents act individually and collectively, combining various infrastructural components that provide access to diverse resources.

Researchers on bike-sharing’s health and well-being benefits suggest that this infrastructural intervention can contribute to overall well-being.63 My goal is different from this. I use bike-sharing as a case to demonstrate the application of the Four-I model, illustrating how this model can support designers in taking a resource-based approach to conceptualize infrastructural interventions.

Interactions among Diverse Agents: Why Are Resources Flowing?

Infrastructures condition the interactions among diverse agents by providing access to and enabling (or constraining) the use of resources within specific organizational arrangements. Entities within these arrangements, whether human or non-human, have agency in shaping the interactions and outcomes in each ecosystem. Non-human agents might represent offerings from organizations (e.g., objects, environments, messages, or services) or parts of the natural environment (e.g., fauna, flora, temperature, water, and so on).

The design of infrastructural interventions to improve well-being is often constrained by the assumption that these interactions are fixed. Before bike-sharing systems, it was hard to imagine creating a micro-mobility system to complement or even compete with existing bus and subway systems. It took decades for organizations to understand how bike riders, advertising companies, mobility researchers, environmental scientists, government agencies, product developers, finance, app designers, data managers, wireless and cyber security providers, and solar panel installers could all effectively cooperate in building and following bike-sharing standards and protocols. Once a robust model was designed and prototyped, similar arrangements, with a few variations, were created, turning these agents into gateways to a variety of resources that enable, monitor, and improve the bike riding experience.

The Arrangements of Systems framework utilizes the logic of Value Webs.64 It challenges the notion that modern arrangements are fixed. Unlike Value Webs, which model value exchanges within a specific business ecosystem based on the interests of key stakeholders, this framework reveals archetypes of organizational arrangements based on the function that each agent assumes in the flow of resources. To do so, it utilizes Innovation Lenses to expand a team’s understanding of current flows of resources and explore why the redirection of certain flows or the rearrangement of the ecosystem would allow for better well-being outcomes. By clustering agents according to their constituencies (people, organizations, natural environment), teams can better comprehend what relationships underlie infrastructural interventions and what kinds of resources are being accessed and utilized within these clusters. Figure 5 shows a high-level example of how interactions among diverse agents might shape resource flows in bike-sharing systems. Among other things, this figure demonstrates how bike-sharing systems, although contributing to individual well-being, are still operating in a resource-extractive model, failing to contribute to environmental regeneration.

Figure 5.

Arrangements of Systems. Triangles and human symbols represent key agents that access and utilize resources. Trees represent the natural environment. Arrows represent key resources these entities receive and provide to other agents in this diagram. Labels in the arrows are color-coded according to the type of resource they represent. © 2022 André Nogueira.

Integration of Multiple Systems: Where Are Resources Flowing?

Mass production, mass markets, and mass media were some of the underlying forces leading societies to create a variety of governance boundaries for efficient resource allocation in infrastructural interventions. In governments, these boundaries became sub-structures within ministries, departments, and agencies. In corporations, they became embedded within departments, such as marketing, operations, strategies, product development, customer support, legal support, and information technology. Each with specific agendas and budgets, these governance boundaries became silos with internal management practices aimed at minimizing operational and production costs while maximizing the potential (financial) value presented by massive infrastructural demands and market opportunities. While siloed structures helped enrich societies during the 20th century through infrastructural interventions in various systems, communication technology and advanced computational capabilities are increasingly exposing the intertwined nature of contemporary well-being problems, suggesting that the variables present in one system may directly impact the outcomes of another.

Racial profiling, or the “use of race as a criterion in police decision making during discretionary traffic and field interrogation stops,”65 is not a variable often considered in the design of micro-mobility systems. But Divvy, the docked bike-sharing system of Chicago, Illinois, faces significant issues with the police issuing more biking tickets to Black and Latinx populations than other demographics.66 Studies have also demonstrated that docking systems are inequitably distributed and segregated in many cities.67 Activities performed by agents in one government silo (the Chicago Police Department) directly influence, shape, and prevent the success of infrastructural interventions created by another (the Chicago Department of Transportation). Without a proper framework to help integrate considerations of how variables influence each other across governance boundaries, it is unlikely that leading agents will know where to create infrastructural interventions for more sustainable and equitable well-being outcomes.

The Dynamics of Systems framework helps teams identify population-level patterns and uncover frictions between personal aspirations, organizational goals, and ecological integrity (Figure 6 ). It shows the dynamic relationships between meaningful elements, which can vary in each situation or system. These variables condition people’s daily experiences and ability to meet aspirations (e.g., access to dock stations, number of bikes available, quality of bike lanes, behavior of car drivers) and organizations’ practices to create and capture value (e.g., influence in policy change, ability to understand bike riders, investments in cycle-friendly roads, capacity to form partnerships). The variables also condition ecological integrity (e.g., the amount of carbon sequestrated, emission of pollution, soil health, air quality, and average temperature).

Figure 6.

Dynamics of Systems. Circles in the diagram represent variables. Solid arrows indicate there is a positive correlation between variables or that these elements vary in the same direction. Dashed arrows represent a negative correlation or that these elements go in opposite directions. © 2022 André Nogueira.

Variable identification is a method predominantly used in systems modeling and correlation analysis.68 It recently caught the attention of designers interested in expanding their systems design toolkits.69 Within the Four-I paradigm, variables can be quantitative or qualitative. They are identified by analyzing various data sources, including people’s stories, public and organizational policies, mainstream and scientific articles, etc. Once variables from one source are identified, teams must state the nature of their relationships. Two variables can have a positive correlation and vary in the same direction, or a negative correlation and vary in the opposite direction. To identify latent patterns, teams must aggregate variable correlations from the same source and compare variable aggregations across different sources. These exercises will help teams identify key drivers and barriers to systems change based on otherwise hidden relationships between variables. Teams should then frame a purpose for making a positive change to the well-being of people, organizations, and the ecosystems within which they reside, based on the identified barriers and drivers of systems change.

Interconnectivity between Organizational Levels: How Are Resources Flowing?

Understanding a problem through different levels of abstraction or imaginary scales supports and upholds many governance boundaries and related fields in organizing information. This enables people to make sense of complexity, understand context, cope with uncertainty, systematize interventions, and theorize patterns across different phenomena. Each with its own category, all of these practices can be roughly divided into three levels: macro (system dynamics), meso (organizational structures), and micro (individual parts). Business progress happens by aligning a company’s strategic, operational, and tactical management activities.70 Geopolitics investigates the relationships between decisions made at global, national, and local levels.71 Transition studies explore shifts through landscape, regime, and niche.72 Biology organizes knowledge within and across organisms, organs, and cells.73 Public health interventions focus on policy, group, or individual changes.74 Design addresses complexity through multi-systems, uni-systems, and products.75

Any city implementing a bike-sharing program faces challenges at the macro, meso, and micro levels. At the macro level, they need to design new strategies, regulations, and policies to provide necessary services. At the meso level, they need new bike lanes, communication systems, as well as continual maintenance and improvement. At the macro level, new bikes, parking docks, and apps are created to serve users. Each of these levels represents a level of abstraction composed of less abstract levels, or “holons,” as described in complex adaptive systems theory.76 While each hierarchical level requires autonomy for its efficiency, a lack of synchronicity can lead to low efficiency or unintended consequences since single-level choices will invariably be made on the unrealistic assumption that the other levels will adapt accordingly. Designing regulations in a city, for example, requires a diverse range of resources and information, from planning and implementing bike lanes across the urban grid to designing and supporting interactions between bikes and an app. When organizations concomitantly deal with infrastructural challenges of different abstraction levels, they can benefit from a framework that reveals how current resources are or could be flowing within and across them.

The Anatomy of Systems framework provides a structure to systematize and standardize understanding of how resources are accessed and used by different agents (components and activities at the micro-level) and the impact they create (meso-level dynamics) in pursuit of well-being purposes (macro-level goals) (see Figure 7 ). This framework provides an alternative to a hierarchical and authoritarian understanding of organizations. It does this by flattening activities across levels and revealing a deeper understanding of how diverse agents assemble infrastructural components to create the conditions needed to support their well-being.

Figure 7.

Anatomy of Systems. The pink lines in this image show that when several components are assembled to pursue a purpose, they enable specific activities that create certain impacts. © 2022 André Nogueira.

Iterations over Time: When Are Resources Flowing?

Unlike product and service design, which tends to focus on solving identified needs in the present, infrastructural interventions have an added level of temporal complexity. They must account for how future generations will access and use different types of resources and the factors preventing current generations from doing so. Conceptually, there is a cyclical influence: humans create new infrastructures, which in turn direct and limit the behavior of people, organizations, and the natural environment.

This loop creates path dependencies or organizational practices that tend to orient resources in one direction and elicit further moves in the same direction. It is also subject to change due to the non-linear nature of the activities allowed by the infrastructure. As Noel Cass and his colleagues77 point out, infrastructural interventions are always “linked to a persistently dynamic profile of activities and practices.” The paradoxical and indeterminate nature of infrastructures requires organizations to respond to emerging dynamics. An essential condition for succeeding in this endeavor is understanding patterns over time so that future interventions can incorporate historical challenges without being constrained by them.

Bike-sharing systems went through many iterations after the initial intervention in 1965, when bikes in Amsterdam were painted white and offered by the counterculture group Provo to the general public.78 Known as Witte Fietsen (white bicycles), this program failed because people either threw bikes into the canals or used them for private purposes.79 While bike culture in Dutch society was already strong, governance structure and business models did not fit this novel context. Instead of further iterations, the program crashed within days. It took approximately 30 years for the second generation of bike-sharing intervention to be developed. After interventions made in smaller cities like Farsø and Grenå in 1991, and in Nakskov in 1993, Copenhagen launched the Bycyklen program, also known as City Bikes.80 Components of the infrastructure were changed: a bike was designed specifically for this program, bike stations were introduced, and a new organization responsible for governance was created. The anonymity of users remained, and so did the resulting vandalism and theft. Finally, Portsmouth University in England created a system for its community that addressed this issue through various technological innovations that made security mechanisms affordable. For example, magnetic cards could be used to rent bikes. Bike locks and racks were made able to be unlocked electronically. Access and tracking capabilities through mobile phones were introduced, and computers were installed on kiosks for on-boarding new users. The success of this program led to broader adoption and further development. By the end of 2008, there were approximately 92 such programs worldwide.81

From standardization of product technology to improved data and computational mechanisms, the infrastructural intervention of bike-sharing has been continually iterated upon and refined. These improvements encouraged faster and broader adoption in many cities throughout the world. They also allowed for new data-gathering mechanisms and potential learning points, including significant challenges around product inclusion, culture, and governance.

Chicago’s initial bike-sharing program, Divvy, did not cater to the diversity of its residents. In response, Divvy created a new program called Divvy 4 Everyone in 2015.82 Among other interventions aimed at addressing barriers to accessing Chicago’s bike-sharing systems,83 it provided new services that challenged the perception that only rich and predominantly white people could ride a bike, offered a discount for low-income groups that could not afford the service, and created ways for unbanked people to participate. At the same time, Chicago prototyped the use of dockless systems in low-income neighborhoods to increase accessibility of bikes. A question arises as to why, initially, Divvy was not designed for everyone. Similar issues had been experienced in other cities and considered by scholarly publications before Divvy was first launched84 and its equity-focus program was conceptualized.85 Without a proper framework to map past infrastructural interventions and their resulting impact on society, organizations will continue to fall short in understanding how the hard and soft dimensions of infrastructures must fit and evolve together to succeed in contributing towards more sustainable and equitable well-being outcomes.

The Cycles of Systems framework supports understanding how past infrastructural choices can inform future opportunities to improve well-being as demonstrated in Figure 8 . A historical analysis of shifts within the sector, industry, discipline, or context of intervention can help understand patterns and their evolution over time with consideration of the prioritization of resource allocation. This framework builds on the work of Lance Gunderson and C. S. Holling.86 It considers three fundamental shifts in large scale transformations: cognitive, algorithmic, and behavioral. A cognitive shift happens when people and organizations understand something they did not know. Cognitive shifts usually occur when new information is released or existing information is presented in new ways. Algorithmic shifts occur when new systems in place provide alternative pathways for problem framing and solution finding. Behavioral shifts take place when people and organizations adopt new patterns of daily life and operations. This framework situates design actions between these shifts, taking account of activities for four phases: uncovering, prototyping, orchestrating, and enabling large-scale transformations. One value of this exercise is objective analysis. Its main value, however, is the subjective exploration of historical patterns set against such fundamental shifts. Ultimately, this understanding helps agents understand the fit between the infrastructural interventions being conceptualized and the shifts occurring.

Figure 8.

The Cycles of Systems demonstrates two cycles of infrastructural intervention within micro-mobility systems. © 2022 André Nogueira.

Discussion

Bike-sharing systems are examples of how modern organizations shape well-being. They do this by determining how resources flow within and across geographies. This capacity directly impacts people’s lives and the integrity of the ecosystems supporting their activities that promote well-being. Saskia Sassen87 discusses how these processes—formed by the specific interests of organizational arrangements—promote transformations within daily life. She argues these organizational arrangements are not optimized to promote well-being. Instead, she suggests that they are molded around and designed for competition and disputes within societies and between socio-economic groups. Sassen writes that these arrangements perpetuate existing power dynamics and injustice through inequitable flows and distribution of well-being benefits and burdens. Without design models that create infrastructural interventions to support sustainable and equitable access and use of resources, modern organizational arrangements will continue to benefit a few hegemonic systems at the expense of the well-being of many participating in their business ecosystems, including the natural environment.

Although I utilize bike-sharing to illustrate one potential use case, there is a number of public health efforts that serve as excellent examples of how existing infrastructural interventions enable the formation of organizational arrangements that can lead to inequitable well-being outcomes. These include Covid-19 vaccine markets,88 inequality in humanitarian crisis management,89 quarantine protocols and guidelines that disregard cultural factors,90 nutritional and dietary recommendations that fail to consider cultural diversity,91 and logistics of vaccine distribution that ignore widespread government corruption.92 In this section, I elaborate on how the Four-I can support organizations in conducting well-being analyses and exploring alternative futures by considering resource flows within the existing infrastructure.

The Four-I has helped users of the model better understand different parts of infrastructural interventions. The relationship between the frameworks has helped users integrate hard and soft dimensions in at least three ways. First, they have rendered visible otherwise hidden or only informally understood relationships between various elements shaping well-being outcomes, including agency, stakeholder interactions, and infrastructural components. Such clarity has informed the utilization of resources by stakeholders in collaborative ways that add and create value for their well-being and the environment in which they live. This resource-based structure has also helped shape collective dialogues across functional, disciplinary, and sectorial perspectives about what interventions are needed, how they should be structured, who should be responsible for promoting interventions, where and when they can be created, and which parties are to be the ultimate beneficiaries. Beyond reinforcing the need for new forms of collaborative practices for promoting infrastructural change, the Four-I has helped collaborating agents realize that not all infrastructural interventions can or should be tackled by putting humans at the center and has further integrated considerations of non-human agents in the design of infrastructural interventions.

Second, because the model can be used both descriptively and prescriptively, it has helped multidisciplinary teams anticipate the consequences of changing individual parts in any of the Is, making visible the cascading impacts of such change within and across the other parts of the model. The Dynamics of Systems, for example, shows how variables present in one system influence the dynamics of other systems. When using this framework during co-design activities, teams relied on graphic design techniques, such as color coding, thicknesses, and shapes, to differentiate the flows of diverse resources, their directions, and existing and desired correlations between variables. Such an approach enabled team members to negotiate, explore, communicate, and envision desirable changes and their potential impacts. In the case of brownfield redevelopment previously introduced, stakeholders involved in the project found a clearer understanding of correlations between variables influencing experiences around a contaminated natural site. Such an output prompted a more comprehensive set of strategies to support well-being-oriented infrastructural interventions, going beyond the technicalities of site cleaning and economic development to embrace the aspirations of those living close to the contaminated terrain.93

Last, the Four-I has helped users anticipate and balance the positive and negative impacts of their interventions in a more holistic manner by considering the flows of social, ecological, and technical capital. In this choice-making process, the model has been used to explore and weigh up the interests and ideas of different stakeholders against the perceptions of the costs and benefits of others. For example, after using the model, Plant Chicago, a partner involved in one of the cases previously mentioned, changed its purpose from education and research to cultivating local circular economies in a low-income neighborhood. While such a decision had complex political and financial implications, these were outweighed by the increased involvement of local stakeholders during co-designing activities for framing problems and exploring future opportunities. The process of co-designing infrastructural interventions for more collaborative practices helped Plant Chicago strengthen relationships with their neighbors, increase the chances for future engagements in circular economy activities, and provide all stakeholders involved with a better understanding of the social-ecological-technical benefits they all seek when trying to increase the circulation of natural resources.94

The Four-I represents an integrative approach to understanding existing infrastructures and creatively exploring potential well-being-oriented infrastructural interventions. Together with colleagues, I continue to pioneer this resource-based view approach, formalizing and advancing design knowledge into a more structured set of frameworks and methods, creating courses offered at different universities, publishing case studies,95 conducting research,96 and creating executive programs. While yet to be fully consolidated, this work has advanced in the last four years. It has been adopted by designers working with sustainability and equity issues97 and has been recognized by design awards in student98 and professional categories.99 Importantly, ongoing advancements in this endeavor continue to support a paradigm shift in design, helping individuals and organizations incorporate considerations of resource access and use as elements in need of more rigorous and open debates when designing infrastructural interventions. Below, I situate this contribution within the field of design and to the emerging application area of well-being.

Contributions to Design

The last decade of the 20th century has seen the rise of fundamental conceptual and theoretical debates around the role of infrastructure in shaping well-being-related outcomes.100 Karen Ruhleder and Susan Leigh Star101 recognize that infrastructures that work properly are formed based on a set of standards and protocols concerning how both soft and hard dimensions give or inhibit access to different types of resources. Awareness of such considerations has ignited researchers’ increasing interest in reconceptualizing the conventional technical and modern functional approach to infrastructures.

The concept of things (as opposed to objects) is arguably the most recent development in designing infrastructures. According to Erling Björgvinsson and his colleagues,102 “Things were originally assemblies, rituals and places where disputes were dealt with and political decisions made.” They argue that this conceptualization expands design practices beyond projects with a clear beginning and end, often led by a single organization, to the involvement of selected stakeholders experiencing the problems being addressed. In this article, I leverage this conceptualization. Rather than examining a series of activities that engage different stakeholders in creating new interventions (what) or processes (when), I have conceived participatory design practices as a means through which different agents can continually handle their matters of concerns and controversies together. Depending on how they are designed and who is involved in the process, infrastructural interventions will reflect conditions negotiated by diverse agents. This open-ended perspective recognizes that successful infrastructural interventions enable diverse agents to access and use different types of resources according to their own contexts.

The iterative nature of this conceptualization allows for the framing and reframing of resource flow in response to the interests of stakeholders involved in these activities. It renders visible the critical aspects of both its hard and soft dimensions. The Four-I has helped multidisciplinary teams to consider four infrastructural attributes concerning resource flow: interactions among diverse agents, integration of multiple systems, interconnectivity between organizational levels, and iteration over time. Rigorously applied, agents leading change can use the Four-I to gain an expanded and integrated understanding of where current infrastructural interventions fall short, and why. When infrastructures are systematically explored through a resource-based approach, different disciplines, including design and public health, can work together to find new possibilities and opportunities for organizations to create well-being-oriented interventions.

Contributions to Well-Being

International organizations have focused on growing their presence in emerging markets since the second half of the 20th century. Production capabilities that helped organizations overcome development challenges in Western countries, such as the United States, the United Kingdom, Norway, Switzerland, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and several countries in the European Union, became empowered to increase operational efficiency for conquering territories elsewhere in a competitive global economy. In this discourse, the presence, articulation, and involvement in global Western organizational arrangements are pushed as a progressive developing force. In turn, existing daily life activities at the local level in non-Western geographies are framed as underdeveloped and suffer oppression under these arrangements. Consequently, well-established local infrastructural systems become increasingly disrupted by large-scale, industrialized, and more complex infrastructures.103

Recent studies have shown that well-being interactions between and among non-human agents are as influential in determining well-being as interactions between and among humans. A well-being interaction is a symbiotic relationship that occurs when any agent affects the well-being of another agent. Every well-being interaction is conditioned by how diverse agents are arranged and how they exchange resources in a transactional manner (for example, an individual purchasing a single bike ride from a dock station powered by solar panel systems) or in a temporal pattern (for example, people relying on the bike-sharing infrastructure to commute to work).

At the turn of the 21st century, the United Nations ran an international program called the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment.104 The goal was to gather information related to the conditions and trends of the earth’s ecosystems and the services they provide to people and generate potential strategies for designing infrastructural interventions to increase the sustainability of current arrangements.105 The assessment represented an important reframing of understanding the ecology of natural environments. It highlighted the dependency of people’s and organizations’ health and well-being on the ecology of natural environments.106

The underlying assumption of the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment and related studies is that when ecosystems are functioning well, they can provide resources that enable societies to live in physical security while satisfying their basic needs for food, water, and shelter, as well as individual health and social interactions. Recent studies have confirmed these assumptions by providing scientific evidence for this positive association.107 Even so, the anthropocentric nature of how people and organizations interact with the natural environment has contributed to more than 60% of ecological degradation.108 Moreover, the extent to which well-being benefits from these resources are inequitably accessed and used also reveals how we must redesign current infrastructures.109 When interactions between people, organizations, and the natural environment rely on the inequitable and unsustainable use and exchange of resources, the well-being of these three constituencies comes under threat.

Conclusion

In this article, I rely on several historical and contemporary examples of infrastructural interventions to explore the complexity underlying well-being challenges. These challenges arise from diverse agents arranging themselves within business ecosystems that determine resource flow through available infrastructures. Agents with greater power and influence within existing organizational arrangements set conditions that give them exclusive access to, control of, and ownership over resources needed to sustain their operations and competitive advantage. Other stakeholders, including users, utilize these systems to perform their daily activities and achieve their goals. Depending on the nature of the interactions between agents involved in the organizational arrangements, some activities have positive outcomes, and others negative.

But what if professional multidisciplinary teams working in complex infrastructural challenges could strategically leverage resource flow to promote the well-being of people, organizations, and the natural environment? What performance metrics, indicators of success, and signals of change would policymakers use to track and manage diverse resource flows promoted by their proposals? How could resource access and use become a strategy for creating a “collaborative advantage”110 among stakeholders influencing public health? What frameworks and methods could multidisciplinary teams deploy to map and integrate available assets distributed across diverse agents in a certain geography?

Instead of reinforcing isolated efforts that search for definite answers, I explore infrastructures as a place where design and public health may converge. I reference a resource-based view framework called Innovation Lenses and present a resource-based view model called Four-I. Together, they offer different lenses to investigate the flows of various resources through the interactions among diverse agents, the integration of multiple systems, the interconnectivity across organizational levels, and iterations over time. These contributions provide a new structure and relevant questions for teams to consider the flow of diverse resources when designing infrastructural interventions to improve the well-being of people, organizations, and the natural environment.

Declaration of Interests

There are no conflicts of interest involved in this article.