Abstract
At the Engineering Interventions workshop organized by the International Network of Engineering Studies (INES) in November 2024, Bård Torvetjønn Haugland, Marianne Ryghaug, and Roger A. Søraa were awarded INES’ inaugural Best Paper Award for the article ‘Framing Intelligent Transport Systems in the Arctic.’ The essay is a revised and expanded version of the lecture Bård Torvetjønn Haugland gave upon accepting the award and combines insights from ‘Framing Intelligent Transport Systems in the Arctic,’ Aldo Leopold’s influential essay ‘Thinking Like a Mountain,’ and the field of infrastructure studies. When combined, these insights suggest that infrastructures are fruitful sites for observing and understanding how engineers produce and reconstitute nature-culture hybrids in specific contexts, but also how these hybrids are constituents in another, larger order. The essay introduces the notion of thinking like an infrastructure, and discusses its descriptive aim, possible methodological approaches, and the prospect of shifting the concept from a descriptive to a normative mode.