Abstract
Sustainability transitions are marked by growing pains: tensions between planetary and local scales, global urgency and lived experience. This paper argues that techno-centric, metric-driven, and scalable approaches obscure inequalities, conceal the labour of maintenance, and overlook affective dimensions. It proposes a counter-infrastructural approach that understands sustainability as emerging through infrastructural, ecological, temporal, embodied, and relational dynamics. Drawing on interdisciplinary theory, participatory workshops, and experiential experiments, the study shows how process-oriented practices can reconnect individuals to energy systems. Bioregional thinking, community-led initiatives, repair and maintenance, and sensory engagement are explored as alternatives that foreground resilience and interdependence. Through lenses of scale, care, and embodiment, design is positioned as mediator between abstract environmental metrics and lived realities, raising questions of governance, ethics, and emotions. Designing with trouble reframes sustainability not as a problem to solve but as ongoing negotiation, where uncertainty, incremental care, and situated knowledge enable more just and inclusive transitions.
Keywords
care, embodied design, infrastructure, scale
DOI
https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2026.2526
Citation
Lee, A. (2026) Growing pains of sustainability: Scale, care, and counter-infrastructures, in Simeone, L., Gray, C. M., Verhoeven, A., de Götzen, A., Bakırlıoğlu, Y., Zohar, H., Stead, M., and Buwert, P. (eds.), DRS2026: Edinburgh, 8–12 June, Edinburgh, United Kingdom. https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2026.2526
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Included in
Growing pains of sustainability: Scale, care, and counter-infrastructures
Sustainability transitions are marked by growing pains: tensions between planetary and local scales, global urgency and lived experience. This paper argues that techno-centric, metric-driven, and scalable approaches obscure inequalities, conceal the labour of maintenance, and overlook affective dimensions. It proposes a counter-infrastructural approach that understands sustainability as emerging through infrastructural, ecological, temporal, embodied, and relational dynamics. Drawing on interdisciplinary theory, participatory workshops, and experiential experiments, the study shows how process-oriented practices can reconnect individuals to energy systems. Bioregional thinking, community-led initiatives, repair and maintenance, and sensory engagement are explored as alternatives that foreground resilience and interdependence. Through lenses of scale, care, and embodiment, design is positioned as mediator between abstract environmental metrics and lived realities, raising questions of governance, ethics, and emotions. Designing with trouble reframes sustainability not as a problem to solve but as ongoing negotiation, where uncertainty, incremental care, and situated knowledge enable more just and inclusive transitions.