Large scale infrastructures are the backbone of modern societies, both in symbolic and in practical terms. During the heroic system building of the 19th and 20th centuries more and bigger infrastructures were seen as guarantee for a better life for all. However, since the 1970s modern infrastructures have increasingly become problematic for what they do to people and their environments. In the 2020s, the perfect storm of pandemic, new wars, and ongoing climate change have revealed the real vulnerability of the basic infrastructures that provide our daily food, mobility, housing, communication, entertainment, energy, and consumer goods. Rethinking and rebuilding infrastructures, it is now clear, must go beyond efforts to fix the existing ones through better technology and new business models.  

In theory, modern infrastructures are amazingly complex entities that weave together large networks of individuals, institutions, big and small artifacts, animals, plants, etc. They are the networks of pipes, wires and tunnels underground, the buildings in which modern humans live and learn, the bridges that they cross or the facilities that produce the food that they eat. These entities inhabit the socio-technical background of everyday life, which means that they are always available, they deliver their services consistently without failure, and they free individuals from having to use their time thinking about their subsistence. In practice, however, infrastructures privilege some social groups and disadvantage others, they are contested, destroy livelihoods slowly or quickly, and they fail regularly in small and big ways. They are built to be controlled and to control their users, rather than to be cared for and to care for.  

The good infrastructure lab conducts research on the tension between potentials of modern infrastructures to enable 'the good life for all' and their practical performance. The basic perspective enabling our work is a double infrastructural inversion: The first inversion, proposed and applied in the work done in the 1990s by Bowker, Star and others, is a Gestalt switch in which the background of infrastructures is turned into a 'figure' that establishes infrastructures as a matter of concern. Building on ethnographies of infrastructures, we add to this a second inversion, in which infrastructures are analysed as performed 'from below', i.e., through the experiences, interpretations, actions, needs, and desires of their users. These analyses of 'infrastructural inversion in the wild' and 'user-driven infrastructuring' contribute to studies of technology end-use and to infrastructure studies and enable us to rethink and build better infrastructures. 

Currently, the lab members, in addition to working with their projects, conduct a living lab on circular university furniture together. The lab continuously welcomes applications for research stays.