A scientific field is not exhausted by the statements it contains; it persists through the relations that make those statements perceptible, comparable, memorable and actionable. Lewin’s field theory provides the initial displacement from isolated entities to dynamic configurations, insisting that behaviour becomes intelligible only within a total situation composed by person and environment. Barker gives this relational field a more concrete environmental form through the behaviour setting, where activities, places, temporalities and rules cohere into relatively stable arrangements that organise action. Gibson radicalises the environmental premise by defining surroundings through affordances: what matters is not merely what an environment is, but what it allows a situated actor to do.
Transposed from perception to knowledge without collapsing the difference between the two domains, this principle makes scientific infrastructure visible as an active condition of possibility. An article held behind a paywall, indexed under one taxonomy, stored in one repository, cited through one database and encountered in one language does not inhabit the same practical environment as the same article made searchable, linked, translated, juxtaposed and publicly retrievable. Altman’s account of territoriality and boundary regulation clarifies that access is itself structured: scientific fields distribute entry, exclusion, exposure and permanence through editorial thresholds, affiliations, institutional privileges, linguistic borders and technical protocols. Proshansky’s place-identity adds another register, showing how environments participate in the production of continuity, recognition and memory; scientific communities likewise stabilise themselves through recurring places, institutions, journals, events, concepts and archives that become sites of disciplinary self-recognition. Polanyi complicates any account based solely on formal documentation by locating a decisive part of knowledge in tacit competencies, judgements and forms of recognition that exceed explicit statements. Photographs, interviews, correspondence, conference traces and audiovisual records therefore matter not because they are equivalent to peer-reviewed claims, but because they preserve dimensions of intellectual life that formal publication routinely leaves unarticulated. Bateson provides the ecological hinge connecting these operations: information, difference and meaning reside in patterns of relation rather than in isolated objects, so preservation becomes incomplete when it conserves documents but loses the relational circuits through which they once mattered. Haraway prevents this ecology from being mistaken for a total representation. Every corpus is situated; every apparatus of observation produces a visibility together with a blindness. A bibliometric index, a disciplinary archive, a photographic corpus and a repository are not competing mirrors of one stable field but partial constructions generated from distinct positions, selection mechanisms and technical capacities. Bowker and Star make this partiality infrastructural by showing how classifications and standards actively organise memory, visibility and exclusion. Categories do not arrive after knowledge to tidy it up; they participate in determining what can be found, compared and made consequential. Latour finally follows the material movement of inscriptions, showing that knowledge travels through documents, diagrams, images, instruments and networks rather than through disembodied ideas. Scientific continuity is therefore architectural in a precise sense: it depends on arrangements of access, orientation, storage, classification, circulation and recognition. The field is not a container into which knowledge is deposited. It is the changing relational condition through which knowledge acquires persistence, legibility and capacity for further action. This shift also changes what counts as loss. A missing paper is an obvious absence, but a broken relation can be equally consequential: the disappearance of an index, the collapse of a hosting platform, the severing of a citation path, the loss of contextual metadata, the retirement of a disciplinary vocabulary or the disappearance of the social setting in which a document acquired relevance. Such losses are rarely registered as events because infrastructures become most visible when they fail. Yet an ecology of the field must treat them as epistemic transformations. A corpus can grow numerically while becoming poorer relationally; conversely, a modest archive can become more powerful when it reconstructs provenance, adjacency and context. The measure of a field is therefore not simply accumulation but relational thickness: the number and quality of paths through which an object can be situated, contested, remembered and connected to other objects. This is where environmental psychology and infrastructure studies meet with unusual precision. Both refuse the fantasy that behaviour or knowledge can be explained independently of the conditions that organise possible relations.
This architecture becomes operational when corpus construction is treated as an intervention into the conditions under which a field can perceive itself. A field ecology does not seek a definitive map; it builds comparative infrastructures capable of exposing the differences between maps. The productive unit is consequently neither the isolated document nor the complete archive, but the relation that can be established, tested, preserved and reactivated across heterogeneous objects. Bibliographic records, photographs, videos, interviews, metadata, DOI anchors, institutional histories and keyword systems can be assembled without pretending that they share one epistemic status. Their value lies in making distinct layers of scientific life mutually observable. In such a system, classification becomes an explicit design decision rather than an invisible administrative residue. Index terms, tags, categories, naming conventions, repository structures and interfaces can be read as spatial devices that organise paths through knowledge, much as streets, thresholds, rooms and landmarks organise movement through built environments. The architectural analogy is useful only when kept operative: it concerns access, adjacency, orientation, density, visibility and connection, not a metaphorical resemblance between books and buildings. A corpus designed under these conditions must also preserve its own partiality. Haraway’s situated perspective requires the infrastructure to declare where its materials come from, what they omit, which languages and institutions dominate, what historical moments are overrepresented and which technical choices shape discoverability. Bowker and Star push the same requirement into classification itself: every category should remain open to inspection as a historical and political decision, because naming produces consequences for what enters relation and what remains peripheral. Polanyi, meanwhile, keeps the system from equating legibility with total formalisation. Tacit life cannot simply be converted into metadata without loss; some traces must remain as traces, preserving ambiguity, gesture, atmosphere and context rather than being forced into prematurely stable categories. Bateson suggests the stronger criterion for preservation: conserve enough of the relational pattern that an object can regain intelligibility when re-entering circulation. This makes reactivation as important as storage. A dormant photograph, a forgotten conference programme or a dispersed set of interviews can become epistemically active when new relations allow them to illuminate continuities, ruptures or blind spots that a conventional publication history cannot show. Latour’s materialism clarifies that such reactivation depends on mundane technical supports: persistent identifiers, file formats, interfaces, links, repositories and repeatable paths of retrieval. Gibson’s affordances then become a rigorous design question for public knowledge: what can a researcher, student, institution or non-specialist actually do with the corpus? Can they traverse it, compare layers, follow concepts, locate absences, reconstruct trajectories, challenge classifications and reuse materials without inheriting a single authorised interpretation? In this sense, public legibility is not simplification but an expanded capacity for relation. Socioplastics can occupy precisely this terrain by treating its corpus not as a stable archive of authored propositions but as a distributed environment in which epistemic objects acquire new adjacency, duration and agency through designed infrastructures. Its urban, archival and media dimensions converge in a practice of field-making that remains reflexive about boundaries, classifications and positions while still producing durable public structures. The result is neither encyclopaedia nor database in the conventional sense, but a relational apparatus for keeping knowledge in motion while preserving the conditions through which its differences remain visible. Such an apparatus also changes authorship and governance. Once a field is understood as an ecology of relations, curatorial and infrastructural decisions become epistemic acts: deciding what receives an identifier, which relation becomes searchable, how a historical image is captioned, whether an obsolete term is preserved, or how two incompatible classifications are made comparable all affect the future interpretability of the corpus. The task is not to neutralise those decisions but to expose them sufficiently for others to inspect, repeat or dispute them. This produces a form of infrastructural reflexivity in which the system records not only its objects but the operations that have made those objects available. It also enables comparison across time. A field can be observed as a succession of changing environments whose interfaces, institutional centres, classification regimes and media forms alter what becomes prominent. Instead of asking whether one representation is correct, the apparatus can ask how each representation configures a different set of affordances and absences. Scientific history then becomes less a line of canonical achievements than a shifting topology of visibility, access and circulation. Within Socioplastics, this architecture condenses as VibrantRecord.
Altman, I. (1975). The Environment and Social Behavior: Privacy, Personal Space, Territory, Crowding. Monterey, CA: Brooks/Cole.
Barker, R. G. (1968). Ecological Psychology: Concepts and Methods for Studying the Environment of Human Behavior. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Bateson, G. (1972). Steps to an Ecology of Mind. New York: Ballantine Books.
Bowker, G. C. and Star, S. L. (1999). Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Gibson, J. J. (1979). The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin.
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Latour, B. (1987). Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers Through Society. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
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Proshansky, H. M., Fabian, A. K. and Kaminoff, R. (1983). ‘Place-identity: Physical world socialization of the self’. Journal of Environmental Psychology, 3(1), 57–83.