Ricerc@Sapienza

Participatory Design (PD) has recently seen efforts to reinvigorate its political capacity, including reflections on the relations between its practices and institutions and a renewed political agenda in the contemporary stage of capitalism, such as the one of nourishing the common. This paper addresses both of these directions, questioning how a renewed political agenda of PD intersects the processes of institutioning in which PD itself takes part.

With the concept of infrastructuring as a background for our reflections, this paper focuses on two complementary verbifications have entered the PD vocabulary: institutioning, which describes engagement with institutions, and commoning, which describes engagement with grassroots communities – and by extension alternative economic frameworks that challenge the status quo. We contribute to this discourse to reflect, theoretically, on themes emerging from the triad of relationships between designers, institutions, and grassroots communities.