Interaction, Integration, Interconnectivity, and Iteration: A New Model for Designing Infrastructure Change

The ongoing Covid-19 pandemic has highlighted the obsolescence of the infrastructures we rely on in our everyday lives. Since the Industrial Revolution, design and public health have taken parallel journeys towards creating everyday infrastructures that condition how people access and use different types of resources to improve their well-being. Design has predominantly helped organizations utilize resources to create systems of offerings that influence people’s activities. Public health, on the other hand, has focused on influencing the allocation of resources for the common good by applying scientific and technical expertise. In this article, I introduce the Four-I model—interaction, integration, interconnectivity, and iteration—as a new resource-based view model that brings together knowledge from diverse fields, including design and public health. This model presents four attributes concerning resource flows: interactions among diverse agents, integration of multiple systems, interconnectivity between organizational levels, and iteration over time. Each attribute entails a guiding question and a related framework useful for designing everyday infrastructures. After illustrating its application in bike-sharing systems, I conclude by showing how using the model expands design knowledge and supports organizations in promoting well-being.