“Collectively Intelligent” Micro-Infrastructure: high and low tech design in climate vulnerable contexts

The notion of collective intelligence has increasingly influenced design methodologies in recent years, especially in the context of new technologies, digital fabrication, and responsive, sensing environments. The authors expand this consideration of collective intelligence to a social, placemaking level to demonstrate its value and potential in developing lasting impact and resilience in post-disaster contexts. At its best, collective intelligence grows locally at the level of community end users as well as globally at the level of transdisciplinary professionals, acting as catalyst for local adoption and replication, while also informing comparable strategies to answer today’s pressing issues in other global contexts. If designed as “collectively intelligent,” smaller, bottom-up projects can effectively build community resiliency while also fulfilling their function as robust infrastructure. There is clearly an opportunity to redefine “infrastructure” in micro-scaled terms. Furthermore, as the power of digital fabrication, “smart” communication and data driven processes, and integrated, interactive sensor components is embraced, designers should not dismiss the equal potential that low-tech, often low-budget, analog-driven projects can have as catalysts for larger systemic impact. High vs. low tech should, therefore, not trigger a dichotomy of choices in disaster response, but rather be seen as coupled strategies to be integrated at once and as appropriate to site. This paper frames side-by-side comparisons of two design responses deployed in similarly vulnerable contexts, New Orleans and Puerto Rico, while discussing the power of applied collective intelligence through simultaneously high and low tech micro-distributed infrastructures.

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ISBN
978-1-944214-31-9