Beyond Procedures: Towards Infrastructuring Curiosity & Visualising Systemic Inquiry
Exploring how intentionally designing the conditions for curiosity can unlock its true systemic potential.
In the previous articles of this series (Part 1, Part 2), I shared how my personal journey, and a critical analysis of literature, led me to question the individualistic and operationalised ways we understand curiosity.
These approaches to cultivating curiosity seem to not harness its systemic potential, particularly when considering its social, political, and subversive dimensions as highlighted in Curiosity Studies, and I wondered what might other approaches might look like.
This article dives into an alternative. Here, I unpack the concept of “infrastructuring curiosity” what it means, how it differs from operationalisation, and explore the questions that guided my initial attempts to visualise these systemic ideas through design research.
Imagining Curiosity as Infrastructure
My inquiry began by adopting an explicit systemic design lens to push beyond the the limits of what I was reading in the literature. This involved considering the systemic conditions, including power dynamics and embedded inequities, that influence curious inquiry, and exploring how we might design for curiosity within these complex environments.
This shift in perspective led to exploring the distinction between operationalising curiosity and infrastructuring it.
- Operationalisation aims to stabilise curiosity for measurement or application. It typically breaks curiosity down into defined steps or procedures, much like a checklist, aiming to make it quantifiable or measurable.
- Infrastructuring, drawing on ideas about deep systems, suggests an ongoing, intentional process of designing environments where desired conditions like curiosity become inherent and emergent within a dynamic social ecosystem, rather than simply imposed.
This means considering how social, environmental, and systemic factors — including power and hierarchy — shape curious practice, and recognising that environments must be inviting to sustain attention. A well-designed library, for instance, doesn’t just tell you to be curious; its very architecture, resources, and atmosphere encourage exploration and create a context where curiosity can flourish.
To put it another way: operationalising curiosity might be a checklist for asking ‘good questions’ in a meeting. Infrastructuring it means redesigning the meeting culture, the physical (or digital) space, and even the power dynamics so that meaningful, challenging questions naturally emerge and are genuinely valued by everyone present.
This idea of ‘infrastructuring curiosity’, imagining it as a condition intentionally brought into being by design, is an intriguing speculative lens. It pushes us to look beyond current understandings and consider the underlying structures that might foster, or indeed manipulate, a collective culture of curiosity.
Thinking in broad strokes, and acknowledging the simplification of such complex visions, we can imagine two vastly different poles:
- At its best, might an intentionally designed curiosity infrastructure propel us towards a Star Trek-like future, where humanity, driven by an inherent and supported yearning to understand, collectively explores the unknown frontiers of knowledge and existence (setting aside, for this heuristic, the show’s own complex colonial undertones)?
- At its worst, however, could the same drive to infrastructure curiosity, if not guided by strong ethical frameworks, pave the way for an all-encompassing surveillance capitalism, where every flicker of interest is tracked, monetised, and channelled, transforming the vibrant human impulse to explore into a predictable and profitable data stream?
The systems we engage with are rarely neutral, shaped by existing power dynamics and inequities that determine who filters information, whose perspectives are prioritised, and what knowledge is deemed valid.
So, if we wanted to infrastructure curiosity for impactful change, designers must actively confront these asymmetries and strive towards conditions that support democratic dialogue where diverse voices genuinely influence outcomes.
Mapping the architecture of our asking
This thinking raised questions about the architecture of our asking:
- How do temporal horizons shape our inquiry?
- What about the systemic context?
- Who holds the power to be curious, and whose curiosity is silenced?
- And what philosophical foundations are we building on?
Like many designers grappling with complexity, I started sketching these questions as a conceptual matrix to make sense of the literature and of the system I was sensing, and to serve as a probe in my research.
Initially, I drew a 2x2 matrix. One axis contrasted ‘Operationalised’ approaches (curiosity as procedure) with ‘Infrastructured’ ones (curiosity as an embedded condition). The other first considered whether practices were ‘By Design’ or ‘Procedurally Deployed,’ focusing on rollout methods:
This excited me, but was also limiting. By design, for instance, risked implying that anything “designed” was inherently good, without deeply questioning power or access. I felt the real nuance was in the underlying intention and posture behind how curiosity was enacted, especially its orientation towards the future.
This led me to reframe that second axis from ‘By Design / Procedurally Deployed’ to ‘Futures-Oriented’ versus ‘Procedurally Enacted’. The goal was to capture:
- Futures-Oriented Enacted: Practices driven by emergence, adaptation, and a vision of “what ought to be.”
- Procedurally Enacted: Practices as routine, possibly stagnant, replication without strong transformative intent.
This evolved into four nuanced quadrants:
- Situated Futures (Infrastructured & Futures-Oriented, like a community project where inquiry is a daily, adaptive rhythm);
- Institutional Rituals (Infrastructured & Procedurally Enacted, perhaps a mandatory “innovation day” that’s more performative than generative);
- Isolated Prototypes (Operationalised & Futures-Oriented, which could look like a teacher’s hopeful but fragile experiment with student-led inquiry);
- Template Thinking (Operationalised & Procedurally Enacted, like a “five steps to creativity” checklist).
This revised map, with its focus on intention and orientation, allowed for a more critical examination of how curiosity is enacted in practice, revealing how even well-intentioned efforts can remain superficial. I further explored this by looking at contemporary well-intentioned efforts have lost meaning — R U OK Day and corporate efforts to acknowledge Pride:
But as I worked with this 2D framework, a deeper challenge began to surface: how could a flat map capture the dynamic, evolving nature of curiosity within complex systems, especially over time?
In the next article, I’ll explore the dimension of temporality, a blind spot I call ‘temporal myopia,’ and how grappling with it led to the evolution of my conceptual model into a third dimension.
This research forms part of my studies in the Master of Design Futures at RMIT University. For full citations and references, read the complete article on Medium.
Author’s Note: This article shares my original research, personal reflections, and insights. AI tools were used in its editing and structural development, helping to clarify, refine, and amplify my narrative.
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