Refuse, Reuse, Repair:�Waste & Speculation.
Refuse, Reuse, Repair: Waste & Speculation
— An introduction to thinking about design and speculation as practices of care…
— … explored through techniques of maintenance, repair, reuse, and discard…
— … using some interesting methods from the field of Discard Studies.
Refuse, Reuse, Repair: Waste & Speculation
Thursday:
— Introductions
— Speculative design beyond “futures”: Speculation as care for the present.
— Waste Epistemologies: Discard studies as a speculative research method.
— Practical activity: “Assembling neglected things”
— Deberes :-)
Refuse, Reuse, Repair: Waste & Speculation
Monday:
— Recap, Show & Tell (Deberes)
— Ontological design: Design as world-shaped and world-shaping.
— Waste Interventions: Discard Studies as a Speculative design method
— Practical activity: “Tiny interventions”
— Discussion, Q&A.
Introductions!
— Who are we all?
— What do we each do in our design practice?
— Is our practice speculative? Why?
— I’ll go first :-)
Speculation as care for/in the present.
Image: Luke Talbot - My Powerbank (2023)
“By focussing on futures, the distant horizon, the possible, preferable and preposterous potentials, many believe that critical and speculative design neglects the near and direct urgency of now – a call to action to affect our collective present”
Matt Ward - A Practice of Hope, A Method of Action, �in Beyond Speculative Design: Past, Present, Future (2021)
“It is hard to say what today’s dreams are; it seems they have become downgraded to hopes – hope that we will not allow ourselves to become extinct, hope that we can feed the starving, hope that there will be room for us all on this tiny planet. There are no more visions. We don’t know how to fix the planet and ensure our our survival. We are just hopeful”
Watching Children of Men, we are inevitably reminded of the phrase attributed to Fredric Jameson and Slavoj Žižek, that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism. That slogan captures precisely what I mean by ‘capitalist realism’: the widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to it.
“Once, dystopian films and novels were exercises in such acts of imagination – the disasters they depicted acting as narrative pretext for the emergence of different ways of living. Not so in Children of Men. The world that it projects seems more like an extrapolation or exacerbation of ours than an alternative to it.”
The future has a politics:
Progress as Teleology.
“There is no alternative.”
“What the bourgeoisie therefore produces, above all, are its own grave diggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable”.
Speculation ≠ Prediction
“[Prediction] is something we are absolutely not interested in; when it comes to technology, future predictions have been proven wrong again and again. In our view, it is a pointless activity.”
“This is the bit we are interested in. Not in trying to predict the future but in using design to open up all sorts of possibilities that can be discussed, debated, and used to collectively define a preferable future for a given group of people”
“By focussing on futures, the distant horizon, the possible, preferable and preposterous potentials, many believe that critical and speculative design neglects the near and direct urgency of now – a call to action to affect our collective present”
Matt Ward - A Practice of Hope, A Method of Action, �in Beyond Speculative Design: Past, Present, Future (2021)
Affirming the speculative as a general orientation, of course, somehow presupposes a critical approach to the present. Why would one want other possible worlds if nothing was wrong with this one?
“On the most general level, we suggest that caring be viewed as a species activity that includes everything that we do to maintain, continue, and repair our 'world' so that we can live in it as well as possible. That world includes our bodies, our selves, and our environment, all of which we seek to interweave in a complex, life-sustaining web.”
Fisher & Tronto 1991 – Towards a Feminist Theory of Caring.
Speculation involves a politics of the future, but also a politics of the present.
“The “ethics” in an ethics of care cannot be about a realm of normative moral obligations but rather about thick, impure, involvement in a world where the question of how to care needs to be posed.”
Discussion: Where do our speculative ideas come from?
— Predictions of the future?
— Normative reactions to the present?
— Or care for the things we value?
Joshua Citarella – e-deologies (2020)
Anthony Dunne & Fiona Raby – Designs for an Overpopulated Planet: Foragers (2017)
Cooking Sections – CLIMAVORE: On Tidal Zones (2015–)
Marta Monge - Border Crossings (2016)
Luke Talbot - My Powerbank (2023)
Speculative design and Discard Studies.
This version of caring for technology carries well the double significance of care as an everyday labor of maintenance that conveys ethical obligation: we must take care of things in order to remain responsible for their becomings [...] Affirming that care is necessary to maintain technologies, even technologies that are not necessarily desirable or even harmful, so that they continue to work well opens to further ethico-political interrogations, such as: What worlds are being maintained and at the expenses of which others?
“Rather than focusing on material waste and trash as the primary object of study, discard studies looks at these wider systems of waste and wasting”
“This broad and systematic approach to how some materials, practices, regions, and people are valued and devalued, become disposable or dominant, is at the heart of discard studies.”
All social, political and economic systems maintain their power by discarding specific people, places, or things.
Not “sustainable design” nor “the circular economy”
— Discard studies does not (necessarily) treat waste as something to be minimised or as a problem in itself.
— It’s also not interested in uncritically sustaining the status quo.
— A method for knowing the world, as much as acting in it.
Waste always overflows its official meanings, and the technical systems designed to manage and contain it .
Instead of a certain list of objects, discard studies starts with a question: What must be discarded for this or that system to be created and to carry on? To persist, systems must rid themselves of people, places, and things that actually or potentially threaten the continuity of those systems. Wasting is a technique of power, but it’s not the only one.
Wastes reveal neglect [descuidado] in the present, and from there to more caring futures.
What sort of neglect?
�– Neglected Epistemologies
– Neglected Values / Norms
– Neglected Relations
– Neglected Differences
Discard Studies Methods
Method 1: Defamiliarization
“Making the familiar, strange”
Calls in to question established epistemologies / ways of knowing.
A myth: “You know waste”.
Finding ways of changing our ideas of what is, and what isn’t waste.
From Viktor Shklovsky (1917): “Literary and poetic devices that interrupted the reader from using normalized and expected modes of perception, reading, or experiencing art”
Some questions to ask: What are the premises of the argument that a given object is waste or not? Are they really true?
Method 2: Denaturalisation
Questions normativities / systems of values.
A myth: “Humans are inherently wasteful”.
Question the values and normative ideas which inform the assumption that any given object is ‘discarded’.
Some questions to ask:
How does this object reflect wider ideas about what is and is not waste?
How did these ideas come to be regarded as ‘natural’ and how did wasting work before this naturalisation?
Who is the ‘us’ invoked?
Who normalized these ideas through ideas of ‘human nature’?
EXAMPLE: Blanca chattareros paper - maybe this is also epistemic.
Method 3: Decentering
Questions systems of relations.
A myth: “Wastes and contamination are externalities”.
“Waste is made through relations between centers and peripheries and how the coherence of the center depends on the periphery. Part of what defines waste is its proper place in industrial systems of production. It ‘clearly belongs in a defined place, a rubbish heap of one kind or another’”
Questions:
Where is this waste sent?
What is being kept “clean”?
Where is the boundary?
What is being sacrificed in order to accommodate it?
What are the externalities – where are value and costs accumulated, what is counted, and what is not?
Unknown Fields Division - Rare Earthenware (2014)
Method 4: Depurification
Questions differences.
A myth: “Purity Is Cleanup, Dirt Is Waste”
“Because of similarities between sorting and purifying, the latter is often used as a metaphor for the former.— it is crucial to differentiate between the ethics of cleanup, which are based in separation, and those of purity, which are based in annihilation.”
Questions:
What are the differences between the different discard practices we encounter?
What is separated, and what is destroyed?
What are the systemic values that give rise to these processes?
Discussion: What do we discard?
Thinking about our own design practices:
— Reactions to the present?
— Or care for the things we value?
Activity!
Activity
In groups of 2 to 3, look for a discarded object, in BAU or around the neighbourhood, which demonstrates a wider system of power of value that we wish to critique or change.
Take photos of it (or bring the object itself back, if it’s possible, and safe).
Consider and discuss the questions raised by our four methods: Defamiliarisation, Denaturalisation, Decentering and Depurification, to help deepen our understanding of the systems at work that led to its discard.
We’ll meet back here at 18h to discuss!
Over the weekend / On monday
Keep an eye out for a broken or discarded object which calls your attention, thinking about what we’ve learned today. Bring it, photograph it, describe it, sketch it!
Be prepared to tell us briefly what the object says to you about wider systems and processes of power and value operating in the world.
On monday we’ll start looking at making change and intervening in the world with discard studies and speculative design.
If you get time, take a look at one of the readings :-)
Refuse, Reuse, Repair:�Waste & Speculation.
Refuse, Reuse, Repair: Waste & Speculation
Monday:
— Recap, Show & Tell (Deberes).
— Waste Interventions: Discard Studies as a Speculative design method
— Practical activity: “Tiny interventions”
— Discussion, Q&A.
“We argue that wasting isn’t inherently good or bad, but it is related to power, including the ability to classify and eradicate”
Recap
Studying waste makes us examine:
�– Epistemologies (Defamiliarisation)
– Norms / Values (Denaturalisation)
– Relations (Decentering)
– Differences (Depurification)
Show and tell
Tell us about / show us your object, and describe briefly:
— The broader system of wasting which led to it being discarded
— The values, relations and differences it reflects
— How you might change that system in a more caring world
El pou de gel d’Arfa
Discarding Well: A theory of change.
“To organize systems differently means not just critiquing them or tweaking some of their components but also fundamentally changing relationships that matter.”
¿What sort of change?
The Discard Studies “theory of change” is:
�– Normative (it doesn’t just deal with what is, but what should be)
– Specific (It deals with the relations and differences involved in a specific field, and avoids universals)
– Systematic (It deals with systems, not symptoms - we always follow the relationships)
– Responsable (It takes responsibility for its failings and its own discards. All systems discard, including our alternatives)
– Incommensurable (It recognises that there is not a definitive universal ‘good’, and that there are always conflicts between different values and interests)
Normativity
– How can this situation be improved?
– For who?
– What values underpin this idea?
Specificity
– Where is our field? Is it a physical place? Is there more than one?
– Who or what lives there? What is their interest in the issue?
– What places or actors are left out?
Systematicness
— What are the important existing relationships?
— Who or what is involved in them?
— How might they change, given our normative ideas?
Responsability
— What needs to change to put our proposed improvement into practice?
— What other consequences might arise?
— Which are desirable, and which not? Can we ameliorate the former?
— Are we capable of assuming responsibility for the negative consequences that remain?
Incommensurability
— Who benefits?
— Who assumes the costs of the negative externalities?
— Where would this intervention not work, and why?
Making change through repair.
Repair vs Innovation
“Entire societies have come to talk about innovation as if it were an inherently desirable value, like love, fraternity, courage, beauty, dignity, or responsibility. [...] A focus on maintenance provides opportunities to ask questions about what we really want out of technologies. What do we really care about? What kind of society do we want to live in? Will this help get us there?”
— Andrew Russell & Lee Vinsel – Hail The Maintainers (2016)
Repair is more interesting!
“The most remarkable tales of cunning, effort, and care that people direct toward technologies exist far beyond the same old anecdotes about invention and innovation.”
— Andrew Russell & Lee Vinsel – Hail The Maintainers (2016)
“Gambiarra”
Photo: Henrique Pinto (CC-0)
“Jugaad”
Photo © Prabuddha Jain (CC-BY)
“The history of the Internet is not, therefore, a story of a few heroic inventors; it is a tale of collaboration and conflict among a remarkable variety of players”
Repair is innovation!
“Worlds of maintenance and repair and the instances of breakdown that occasion them are not separate or alternative to innovation, but sites for some of its most interesting and consequential operations.”
— Steven Jackson – Rethinking Repair (2014)
…and it is made possible by breakdown and discard
“The material world resists, obstructs, or frustrates action, and therefore calls attention to itself (precisely because we must now work to figure out and overcome barriers in our no-longer seamless world).”
— Steven Jackson – Rethinking Repair (2014)
Repair is care
“Foregrounding maintenance and repair as an aspect of technological work invites not only new functional but also moral relations to the world of technology. It references what is in fact a very old but routinely forgotten relationship of humans to things in the world: namely, an ethics of mutual care and responsibility.”
— Steven Jackson – Rethinking Repair (2014)
Mohammed Ali
Ana Otero
Amy Twigger Holdroyd – Fashion Fictions
Stephen Cornford – Petrified Media
Tim Cowlishaw �– Everything that was forgotten was indeed lost.
Activity!
– Think of a repair or discard intervention we might make to our object, in order to bring about a specific positive change in the system or context it lives in.
– Prototype it! (With a description, sketch, diagram, whatever)
– Evaluate it and by guided by the Discard Studies theory of change, using our questions to probe its Normativity, Specificity, Systematicness, Responsibility and Incommensurability.
– We’ll discuss them later!
Prototypes
– Can be realistic, or not, but they are always partial.
– They show, explore, or probe a specific aspect of a larger design or situation.
“What is significant is not what media or tools were are used to create them, but how they are used by a designer to explore or demonstrate some aspect of the future artifact.”
Houde & Hill – What do Prototypes Prototype? (1997)