Infrastructuring value exchange in communities through a boardgame

This paper reports on participatory engagements conducted with four post-industrial marginalised communities in Scotland. Our engagements focused on exploring how new forms of “value exchange” between community members might be facilitated and infrastructured. These towns suffer from inadequate public infrastructure, austerity and isolation. These communities still rely on close-knit relationships with neighbours, family and friends to be resilient to these challenges. The research examines informal interpersonal interactions for creating sustained community value exchange. We developed a Monopoly-inspired boardgame called Exchangeoply to surface, track and quantify these community interactions within the gameplay. Our findings present the boardgame as a tool for infrastructuring existing exchanges and new ways of building social connections and capital within local neighbourhoods. The paper contributes to a better understanding of the process of infrastructuring mutual value exchange and that of re-designing incentivisation through value, to address the issues of longitudinality in volunteer-driven contexts.