Infrastructuring alignment through warming-up practices

As discussed previously, infrastructuring is commonly understood within PD as a process of aligning actors towards emergent practices. Here I highlight how alignment between people can occur through the cultivation of atmospheres that deliberately attempt to impart ways of being. Warm-up activities are commonly used in design workshops to influence how people relate. Most of the time this involves short activities that ‘break the ice’, enabling people to interact and relate more freely with one another. Collaborative Designer Mette Eriksen (2012) refers to a warm-up as ‘mainly about leaving the everyday and getting in the mood’ (313) for collaborative design. Within The Weekly Service, the warm-up practices were designed to foster a generative Figure 43: Warm touches

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space for dialogue. In atmospheric terms, these practices could also be considered as ‘forms of address’ that invite attunement (Sumartojo and Pink 2019, 121).

In the following section I discuss the warming-up practices in relation to the senses of touch, sight and sound. While the senses are separated out below I acknowledge that they cannot be isolated, rather more accurately we can say that we dwell in multi-sensory worlds (Pink 2015).

6.2.1 ‘A warm space’ – touch

Bodily warmth was created at the Service through the material and spatial affordances of the chosen venue and the offering of food, hot tea and coffee. The primary venue where the Service was held was relatively small. This meant that people needed to negotiate others’ bodies in close proximity. Around 40 people could sit or stand comfortably, but when the Service was busy, people would have to press up against others in order to fit. It wasn’t apparent that this was something that people liked, until we proposed to move to another venue. The proposed space was much larger, and in addition to it being an actual Church (something which a number of people resisted) the building was described as ‘cold, lacking in warmth and intimacy’ (See Figure 45). As people introduced themselves to relative strangers, they clutched steaming hot mugs. Conversation was interspersed with hugs between those who were acquainted. These aspects provided sensory heat to the gatherings that cultivated a sense of intimacy and a warm space.

6.2.1 ‘Seeing care used properly’ – sight

Visual warmth was created at the Service through the use of candles lamps and flowers to help set a tone of intimacy. This resembles practices used in Danish homes to create a sense of cosiness, safety and security – captured in the word ‘hygge’ (Bille 2015). Hygge is constituted through soft or warm lighting that can ‘impart a certain sense of place that influences the way people behave and feel’ (ibid, 56). It is also cultivated through the kind of sociality that people engage in, where a lightness is expected and performed. This includes not taking over the conversation and refraining from heavy topics that might dampen the mood (Linnet 2011). In contrast, elaborate flower and plant arrangements at The Weekly Service appeared to support the difficult and darker emotions that were expressed and shared. In some ways, these arrangements are better reflected through mourning practices. Flowers were arranged to greet people on arrival. Sometimes quite elaborate arrangements of plants were clustered around the speaker’s chairs.

Figure 45: Feedback about the proposed Church venue

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These practices were described by one member as ‘seeing care used properly’. Care was conveyed and communicated at the Service via small acts that fostered the flourishing of relations (Puig de la Bellacasa 2017). More broadly I suggest that these many small acts contributed to the cultivation of an ‘infrastructure of care’. I discuss this more in Chapter 7, and draw on how care is understood as an affective and ethical practice by Maria Puig de la Bellacasa (2017), who’s work is situated at the intersection of feminist thought, care ethics and Science and Technology Studies.

6.2.3 ‘Carrying feeling around the room’ – sound

Warmth was generated through moments of meditative silence, listening to music, poetry and heart-warming stories. Such stories, as already highlighted, were commonly intimate tales. Across the first year of my involvement, I heard people tell stories of their desire for forgiveness, their difficulties with their masculinity, the tightness in their stomach at the realisation that ‘mum is drunk again’. These expressions of vulnerability at the Service were both generative of, and dependent upon, warmth. Audiences were frequently praised for being ‘warm’. This was often made explicit in hindsight, when audience members reciprocated with their own expressions of vulnerability, prompted by questions that invited reflection. Through carefully crafted questions, audiences were invited to join in conversation in small groups. The questions would often generate a sense of intimacy, before opening into a larger group discussion.

Other sound-based elements involved listening to music together and singing in unison at the end of the Service. Synchronicity in communal singing involves sharing the inhale of breath, pitch and timing,

and through the regulation of people’s physiological rhythms. The synchronisation of singing together is said to facilitate cohesion in large groups, as people connect with and feel the presence of others they may not know personally (Pearce et al. 2015). Singing may have evolved as a mechanism for social bonding, and is responsible for the release of neuropeptides which are reported to lift one’s mood (ibid). While at first I found the group sing-a-long a little awkward, I was also surprised by the joyful feeling that would flood my body as I sang. It was often a moment wherein the feelings that had built up during the Service were carried around the room.