The design of infrastructures is never neutral. Infrastructural designs are material expressions of values—ideas about how the world should work, about what counts as efficiency, beauty, safety, or civility. These values are built into form: into a curb’s height, a street’s color, a sign’s tone, a line’s thickness. They script behavior in subtle ways, guiding our movements and expectations long before we think about them.

Anthropologists of infrastructure (such as Ashley Carse, Susan Leigh Star, Christof Lammer) have shown how the systems that sustain everyday life—roads, pipes, cables, canals, bureaucracies—carry the imprint of political and moral reasoning. They channel certain possibilities while foreclosing others. A fietsstraat, for example, embodies the principle that cars are guests; it gives spatial form to an ethics of hospitality and hierarchy. Its color, texture, and geometry make an argument about how people and machines should relate.

Yet design is never final. Use always exceeds intention. As people inhabit and adapt designed spaces, they generate new meanings, sometimes confirming the values embedded in form, sometimes subverting them. A curb becomes a bench, a median becomes a meeting place, a rule becomes an improvisation. In this sense, design is an open-ended social experiment: it materializes ideals but is completed only through practice.

Fietsstraat Amsterdam takes this openness as its subject. The camera does not analyze or explain; it simply watches design in action. Over hours, the film records how the physical and the social intertwine: how a red surface becomes a stage for negotiation, how courtesy or irritation emerge from geometry, how a shared street is continually remade by those who move through it.

In this way, the project treats observation itself as a form of design research—a way of tracing how values travel through matter, how ideals are tested by use, and how the ordinary acts of cycling, waiting, overtaking, and yielding reveal the living ethics of the street.