QR code: The global making of an infrastructural gateway

This article traces the history of machine-readable data encoding standards and argues that QR code has become an infrastructural gateway. Through analysis patents, corporate documents advertising, ethnographic observations, interviews with professionals, I describe global making argue convergence standards, mobile computing, machine vision algorithms, platform ecosystems led to emergence a new component computational infrastructures which functions as gateway between different actors, systems, practices. The central section covers seven decades across national regional contexts: from invention popularization barcode in United States, through code’s Japan its success East Asia, platformization China. By revisiting this concepts drawn field infrastructure studies, codes have gateways conclude concept is useful not only understand current role but also identify follow change other come.