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The notion that policing and incarceration are permanent and necessary, if in need of reform or more "humane" design, guides contemporary practices of making in a range of design fields and, increasingly, designers' forays into policy- and government service-making. These projects often take the form of spatial interventions and proposals for new jails, police stations, and, in some cases, the reorganization of the spaces around them. This article examines three projects—Chicago's Polis Station, the New York City Justice Hubs, and the Oakland Power Projects—that contend with the infrastructure of the prison industrial complex, in part by asking people questions about policing and incarceration to envision what to build. Here, I focus on what shaped these questions, and how the questions in turn shaped the possibilities for design that emerged from them, in ways that matter deeply to the imbrication of architecture, design, and punishment.

This paper builds on trajectories in PD that attend to designers' situatedness within the broader systemic contexts in which they work. It proposes (re)considering infrastructuring, understood as a range of approaches to designing socio-material systems, through attention to designers' locations, as one way to imagine what is at stake when designing with people. The paper draws upon a reflective analysis of long-term design research with a social justice organization. The local context of the group and the larger socio-political-historical context of systems of policing with which the group contends shaped our understandings of what was necessary, possible and strategic. Working at the intersections of these infrastructures, in turn, shaped how we designed together. I propose "relational practice" as a framework for critically engaging designers' dynamic positions in infrastructuring and argue that how we design relational practices, and how we understand them, is critical for how we approach infrastructuring as on-going work toward shared, if complex and difficult to imagine, social and political possibilities.Full text at ACM