This talk addresses how community-based design can be developed to sustain interventions for community engagement and empowerment. I argue that by building atop PD, designers working in community settings are not simply creating end products, but are designing publics: socio-technical articulations that address the di?erent tensions, boundaries, and values present in community contexts. These publics are supported by three pillars used to shape the design space and provide end-points against which to assess or re?ect on the designed outcomes: issues are the ?rst pillar and act as a concrete bounding to both the public and the design space—it is through the articulation of issues that individuals form into publics; attachments describe the relationships that develop between the public and the de?nitional issues—attachments cary bi-direction relations as “dependencies on” or “commitments to” di?erent resources, constituencies, or desired outcomes; ?nally infrastructuring
describes the design work of integrating socio-technical responses to issues by way of expressing, forming, and altering the attachments contained within the public. I will explore the framing of issues, attachments, and infrastructuring through several di?erent examples derived from past and present community-based projects.