Everyday Design with Surrounds: Rehearsing Alternatives Amid Urban Sociotechnical Changes

This paper rethinks everyday design by shifting from materially available, physical “surroundings” as design resources to the unsettled, open-ended, and politically entangled “surrounds” as sites of practice. Drawing from ethnographies in New York City and Detroit, we describe how urban communities rehearse alternative ways of living and relating by navigating the interstices of layered infrastructures of governance and development. Rather than locating agency in oppositional acts of resistance or formal interventions, we show how everyday design can unfold through improvisational collectives and situated practices that have yet to be captured or defined by any single layer of dominant infrastructure, but emerge in-between them. We propose surrounds as a generative analytic for understanding the subtle, often fleeting experiments through which people enact alternative relations to governance and order. Positioning everyday design as navigational, rather than apolitical or oppositional, offers HCI new ways to understand the positionalities of design, intervention, and alternatives amid shifting urban sociotechnical conditions.