Information Design Journal - Online First

This article reactivates the interrupted legacy of Project Cybersyn by reconfiguring Stafford Beer’s Viable System Model as a participatory infrastructure for information design. Through workshops with twelve Latin American diaspora participants in the UK, we demonstrate three methodological innovations: (1) cultural citation, which reactivates 1970s visual materials alongside contemporary institutional documents; (2) an approach that privileges affective and relational engagement over data extraction; and (3) the workshop-as-deliverable, which reconceptualizes participatory encounters as legitimate design outputs. Counter-visualizations produced through collage and collective annotation challenge universalist conventions while remaining accountable to situated knowledge. This work positions information design as a cultural practice grounded in specific trajectories, offering methodological alternatives to extractive research patterns.

This article demonstrates the value of positioning theory as a lens for localizing information design in culturally resonant ways. Drawing on 40+ interviews with residents in a Southwestern U.S. community experiencing water scarcity, we develop a positioning theory–based codebook to analyze self-, other-, and collective positionings around responsibility, power, and inaction. This method reveals relational patterns that thematic coding alone might overlook, offering information designers a methodological approach for clarifying how people in communities express and negotiate responsibility and capacity to act. Positioning theory thereby expands the field’s methodological toolkit and introduces localized perspectives that can help information designers create interactions that can foster participation and collective environmental action.