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Unmaking Electronic Waste
Abstract
The proliferation of new technologies has led to a proliferation of unwanted electronic devices. E-waste is the largest-growing consumer waste-stream worldwide, but also an issue often ignored. In fact, HCI primarily focuses on designing and understanding device interactions during one segment of their lifecycles—while users use them. Researchers overlook a significant space—when devices are no longer “useful” to the user such as after breakdown or obsolescence. We argue that HCI can learn from experts who upcycle e-waste and give it second lives in electronics projects, art projects, educational workshops, and more. To acquire and translate this knowledge to HCI, we interviewed experts who unmake e-waste. We explore their practices through the lens of unmaking both when devices are physically unmade and when the perception of e-waste is unmade once waste becomes, once again, useful . Last, we synthesize findings into takeaways for how HCI can engage with the issue of e-waste.
... For example, Song and Paulos [59] examine the "afterlife" of physical prototypes, using the lens of critical making to reconsider the relationship between the materiality of creativity and its environmental impact. Similarly, Lu and Lopes [39] conduct a qualitative study, interviewing seven individual makers and artists who focus on reusing e-waste materials in various making activities. Their work urges HCI researchers to rethink the role of end-users in the broader context of sustainable computing. ...
... Jackson and Kang, for example, conducted ethnographic studies of artists working with discarded technologies to challenge common assumptions about creativity and functionality [28]. Similarly, Lu and Lopes investigated e-waste practitioners, advocating for a reevaluation of users' roles within capitalist systems [39]. Kim and Paulos developed a framework for creative reuse, encouraging the transformation of e-waste through practices such as remaking and remanufacturing [32]. ...
The recent democratization of personal fabrication has significantly advanced the maker movement and reshaped applied research in HCI and beyond. However, this growth has also raised increasing sustainability concerns, as material waste is an inevitable byproduct of making and rapid prototyping. In this work, we examine the sustainability landscape within the modern maker community, focusing on grassroots makerspaces and maker-oriented research labs through in-depth interviews with diverse stakeholders involved in making and managing making-related activities. Our findings highlight four key themes: the various types of "waste" generated through the making process, the strategies (or lack thereof) for managing this waste, the motivations driving (un)sustainable practices, and the challenges faced. We synthesize these insights into design considerations and takeaways for technical HCI researchers and the broader community, focusing on future tools, infrastructures, and educational approaches to foster sustainable making.
Materials capable of extracting gold from complex sources, especially electronic waste (e-waste), are needed for gold resource sustainability and effective e-waste recycling. However, it remains challenging to achieve high extraction capacity and precise selectivity if only a trace amount of gold is present along with other metallic elements . Here we report an approach based on reduced graphene oxide (rGO) which provides an ultrahigh capacity and selective extraction of gold ions present in ppm concentrations (>1000 mg of gold per gram of rGO at 1 ppm). The excellent gold extraction performance is accounted to the graphene areas and oxidized regions of rGO. The graphene areas spontaneously reduce gold ions to metallic gold, and the oxidized regions allow good dispersibility of the rGO material so that efficient adsorption and reduction of gold ions at the graphene areas can be realized. By controlling the protonation of the oxidized regions of rGO, gold can be extracted exclusively, without contamination by the other 14 co-existing elements typically present in e-waste. These findings are further exploited to demonstrate recycling gold from real-world e-waste with good scalability and economic viability, as exemplified by using rGO membranes in a continuous flow-through process.
An argument that social, political, and economic systems maintain power by discarding certain people, places, and things.
Discard studies is an emerging field that looks at waste and wasting broadly construed. Rather than focusing on waste and trash as the primary objects of study, discard studies looks at wider systems of waste and wasting to explore how some materials, practices, regions, and people are valued or devalued, becoming dominant or disposable. In this book, Max Liboiron and Josh Lepawsky argue that social, political, and economic systems maintain power by discarding certain people, places, and things. They show how the theories and methods of discard studies can be applied in a variety of cases, many of which do not involve waste, trash, or pollution.
Liboiron and Lepawsky consider the partiality of knowledge and offer a theory of scale, exploring the myth that most waste is municipal solid waste produced by consumers; discuss peripheries, centers, and power, using content moderation as an example of how dominant systems find ways to discard; and use theories of difference to show that universalism, stereotypes, and inclusion all have politics of discard and even purification—as exemplified in “inclusive” efforts to broaden the Black Lives Matter movement. Finally, they develop a theory of change by considering “wasting well,” outlining techniques, methods, and propositions for a justice-oriented discard studies that keeps power in view.
Countries have sought to stop the spread of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) by severely restricting travel and in-person commercial activities. Here, we analyse the supply-chain effects of a set of idealized lockdown scenarios, using the latest global trade modelling framework. We find that supply-chain losses that are related to initial COVID-19 lockdowns are largely dependent on the number of countries imposing restrictions and that losses are more sensitive to the duration of a lockdown than its strictness. However, a longer containment that can eradicate the disease imposes a smaller loss than shorter ones. Earlier, stricter and shorter lockdowns can minimize overall losses. A ‘go-slow’ approach to lifting restrictions may reduce overall damages if it avoids the need for further lockdowns. Regardless of the strategy, the complexity of global supply chains will magnify losses beyond the direct effects of COVID-19. Thus, pandemic control is a public good that requires collective efforts and support to lower-capacity countries.
Degrowth is incompatible with modern capitalist socioecological configurations, and in fact requires their ‘unmaking’ to open space for post-growth and post-capitalist alternatives. The concept of ‘decolonization of the imaginary’ has captured an element of unmaking in the degrowth debate; however, this concept remains underdeveloped, and thus falls short of providing an analytical basis to understand the range of interconnected, multi-level, and multidimensional processes that make space for radical alternatives to modern capitalist socioecological configurations. This paper engages with literature from across the social sciences on various forms of deconstruction, destabilization, displacement, or unmaking of the social and socio-ecological order, most of which was preciously unexplored in the degrowth debate. By building on that literature, this paper suggests a richer and more insightful approach to conceptualizing the unmaking of modern capitalist socioecological configurations, thus specifying and refining the notion of decolonization of the imaginary. The insights are distilled in five propositions: (i) unmaking is a combination of emergent, situated processes; (ii) processes of unmaking involve both symbolic and material deconstruction; (iii) unmaking is a contradictory personal experience; (iv) unmaking is often hidden, but can be used strategically; and (v) unmaking is generative.
While repair work has recently been getting increasing attention in HCI, recycling practices have still remained relatively understudied, especially in the context of the Global South. To this end, building on our eight-month-long ethnography, this paper reports the electronic waste (`e-waste', henceforth) recycling practices among the e-waste recycler (`bhangari') communities in Dhaka, Bangladesh. In doing so, this paper offers the work of the bhangaris through an articulation of their hands and their uses. Drawing from a rich body of scholarly work on social science, we define and contextualize three characteristics of the hand of a bhangari: knowledge, care, and skills and collaboration. Our study also highlights the pains and sufferings involved in this profession. By explaining bhangari work through the hand, we also discuss its implications for design, and its connection to HCI's broader interest in sustainability.
These conversations bring forward an expansion of the concept of critically engaged making, and in turn expand Ratto’s term of critical making to augment the process of hands-on studio practice. This is vitally important since critically made objects have the power to be evocative “things to think with” that can be documented online, exhibited in public art galleries, or published as case studies in academic papers—and can work to expose the hidden assumptions and values embedded in technological systems to a wide audience. Critically made objects can enable individuals to reflect on the personal and social impact of new technologies, and to provide a provocative, speculative, and rich vision of our technological future that avoids the clichés of consumerism industrial design.
1. Preface
2. Critical Technical Practice and Critical Making: Phoebe Sengers in Conversation with Garnet Hertz
3. Engineering Anti-Techno-Fetishism: Natalie Jeremijenko in Conversation with Garnet Hertz
4. Defining Critical Making: Matt Ratto in Conversation with Garnet Hertz
5. Humanities and Critical Approaches to Technology: Jentery Sayers in Conversation with Garnet Hertz
6. Critique and Making: Alexander R. Galloway in Conversation with Garnet Hertz
7. About the Author
This paper examines the question of "values in repair" -- the distinct forms of meaning and care that may be built into human-technology interactions through individual and collective acts of repair. Our work draws on research in HCI and the social sciences and findings from ethnographic studies in four sites -- two amateur "fixers" collectives' in Brooklyn and Seattle, USA and two mobile phone repair communities in Uganda and Bangladesh -- to advance two arguments. First, studies of repair account for new sites and processes of value that differ from those appearing at HCI's better-studied moments of design and use. Second, repair may embed modes of human interaction with technology and with each other in ways that surface values as contingent and ongoing accomplishments, suggesting ongoing processes of valuation that can never be fully fixed or commoditized. These insights help HCI account for human relationships to technology built into the world through repair.
With this studio-workshop we aim to explore and debate how disassembling computational things can yield a potential for design practices. We believe there are significant qualities to be found in extending the mundane 'taking things apart' into an elaborate practice of un-crafting. The studio workshop comprises a series of collaborative disassembly activities with the aim of beginning to identify the key qualities and issues at stake. We also hope to have a diverse crowd, whose interdisciplinary viewpoints will enable us to ground an un-crafting practice in a diverse set of contexts.
Acts of technology maintenance and repair constitute important and often overlooked moments in the operation of complex interactive systems. They also provide fresh insight on a series of problems -- innovation, learning, and sustainability -- long core to HCI concern. This paper builds on original ethnographic fieldwork in the repair markets of Dhaka, Bangladesh to advance three basic arguments: first, that repair activities in such locations reveal novel and significant forms of craft-based knowledge and innovation; second, that repair work is embedded in local and transnational flows that connect local practices to global networks and institutions; and third, that taking repair work seriously can cast new light on problems of learning and sustainability in the design and operation of complex interactive systems. We conclude with observations that relate our repair-based findings back to problems in interactive systems research and design.
Electrical and electronic waste (e-waste) contains multiple toxic metals. However, there is currently a lack of exposure data for metals on workers in formal recycling plants. The objective of this study was to evaluate workers' exposure to metals, using biomarkers of exposure in combination with monitoring of personal air exposure. We assessed exposure to 20 potentially toxic metals among 55 recycling workers and 10 office workers at three formal e-waste recycling plants in Sweden. Workers at two of the plants were followed-up after 6 months. We collected the inhalable fraction and OFC (37-mm) fraction of particles, using personal samplers, as well as spot samples of blood and urine. We measured metal concentrations in whole blood, plasma, urine, and air filters using inductively coupled plasma-mass spectrometry following acid digestion. The air sampling indicated greater airborne exposure, 10 to 30 times higher, to most metals among the recycling workers handling e-waste than among the office workers. The exposure biomarkers showed significantly higher concentrations of chromium, cobalt, indium, lead, and mercury in blood, urine, and/or plasma of the recycling workers, compared with the office workers. Concentrations of antimony, indium, lead, mercury, and vanadium showed close to linear associations between the inhalable particle fraction and blood, plasma, or urine. In conclusion, our study of formal e-waste recycling shows that workers performing recycling tasks are exposed to multiple toxic metals.
This paper considers the concept of ensoulment in relation to the design principle of promoting quality & equality within Sustainable Interaction Design (SID). The design-theoretic origins and implications are discussed and the background needed to understand this concept and principle are stated. Appropriate design research methods are discussed. Parts of a completed survey are described and initial findings from an ongoing elicitation study for collecting personal inventories is also presented. The implications of the survey and elicitation study for larger scale design research are described, with an eye towards future research.
Research in many fields argues that contemporary global industrial civilization will not persist indefinitely in its current form, and may, like many past human societies, eventually collapse. Arguments in environmental studies, anthropology, and other fields indicate that this transformation could begin within the next half-century. While imminent collapse is far from certain, it is prudent to consider now how to develop sociotechnical systems for use in these scenarios. We introduce the notion of collapse informatics—the study, design, and development of sociotechnical systems in the abundant present for use in a future of scarcity—as a complement to ICT4D and mitigation-oriented sustainable HCI. We draw on a variety of literatures to offer a set of relevant concepts and articulate the relationships among them to orient and evaluate collapse informatics work. Observing that collapse informatics poses a unique class of cross-cultural design problems, we sketch the design space of collapse informatics and provide a variety of example projects. We explore points of connection and distinction between collapse informatics and sustainable HCI, ICT4D, and crisis informatics. Finally, we discuss next steps and comment on the potential value of collapse informatics work even in the event that collapse never occurs.
This paper presents the findings from an exploratory study that looks at how creativity plays a role in the repair and reuse of objects in the home. We are interested in a particular form of creativity that manifests in the everyday -- what John Dewey [8] describes as a constant doing and undergoing, as we actively adjust to everyday situations. The goal of this study is to show evidence of repair as not only an act of restoration, but also as an act of creativity that entails the repurposing and resourcing of objects. This study is part of a larger research initiative known as the Everyday Design, where it is believed that everyone is a designer and that design is an ongoing activity that includes the repair, modification, and appropriation of design objects and systems. Furthermore, this study serves as baseline research for future investigations in how to inform the design of technologies whose lifecycle can be extended for various contexts of use through repair.
In this paper, we report our findings on the adoption practices of used personal digital assistants (PDAs) to inform reuse of outdated computing products. Our interviews with 12 eBay users who bought used PDAs showed a variety of ways in which users indirectly supported sustainability. This allowed us to re-examine sustainability as something that is dynamically and arbitrarily shaped by the users and not just dependent on the sustainable feature of the product. We end with design implications for supporting users' shaping of sustainability.
This paper takes up the problem of understanding why we preserve some things passionately and discard others without thought. We briefly report on the theoretical literature relating to this question, both in terms of existing literature in HCI, as well as in terms of related literatures that can advance the understanding for the HCI community. We use this reading to refine our frameworks for understanding durability in digital artifice as an issue of sustainable interaction design in HCI. Next, we report in detail on our ongoing work in collecting personal inventories of digital artifice in the home context. We relate our prior and most current personal inventories collections to the framework that owes to our reading of the theoretical literature. Finally, we summarize the theoretical implications and findings of our personal inventories work in terms of implications for the design of digital artifice in a manner that is more durable.
This paper presents the perspective that sustainability can and should be a central focus of interaction design—a perspective that is termed Sustainable Interaction Design (SID). As a starting point for a perspective of sustainability, design is defined as an act of choosing among or informing choices of future ways of being. This perspective of sustainability is presented in terms of design values, methods, and reasoning. The paper proposes (i) a rubric for understanding the material effects of particular interaction design cases in terms of forms of use, reuse, and disposal, and (ii) several principles to guide SID. The paper illustrates—with particular examples of design critique for interactive products and appeals to secondary research—how two of these principles may be applied to move the effects of designs from less preferred forms of use to more preferred ones. Finally, a vision for incorporating sustainability into the research and practice of interaction design is described. Author Keywords
This article provides an overview of a series of experiments in what the author calls critical making, a mode of materially productive engagement that is intended to bridge the gap between creative physical and conceptual exploration. Although they share much in common with forms of design and art practice, the goal of these events is primarily focused on using material production—making things—as part of an explicit practice of concept elaboration within the social study of technology.
Scholars from communication and media studies join those from science and technology studies to examine media technologies as complex, sociomaterial phenomena.
In recent years, scholarship around media technologies has finally shed the assumption that these technologies are separate from and powerfully determining of social life, looking at them instead as produced by and embedded in distinct social, cultural, and political practices. Communication and media scholars have increasingly taken theoretical perspectives originating in science and technology studies (STS), while some STS scholars interested in information technologies have linked their research to media studies inquiries into the symbolic dimensions of these tools. In this volume, scholars from both fields come together to advance this view of media technologies as complex sociomaterial phenomena.
The contributors first address the relationship between materiality and mediation, considering such topics as the lived realities of network infrastructure. The contributors then highlight media technologies as always in motion, held together through the minute, unobserved work of many, including efforts to keep these technologies alive.
Contributors
Pablo J. Boczkowski, Geoffrey C. Bowker, Finn Brunton, Gabriella Coleman, Gregory J. Downey, Kirsten A. Foot, Tarleton Gillespie, Steven J. Jackson, Christopher M. Kelty, Leah A. Lievrouw, Sonia Livingstone, Ignacio Siles, Jonathan Sterne, Lucy Suchman, Fred Turner
How we can enact meaningful change in computing to meet the urgent need for sustainability and justice.
The deep entanglement of information technology with our societies has raised hope for a transition to more sustainable and just communities—those that phase out fossil fuels, distribute public goods fairly, allow free access to information, and waste less. In principle, computing should be able to help. But in practice, we live in a world in which opaque algorithms steer us toward misinformation and unsustainable consumerism. Insolvent shows why computing's dominant frame of thinking is conceptually insufficient to address our current challenges, and why computing continues to incur societal debts it cannot pay back. Christoph Becker shows how we can reorient design perspectives in computer science to better align with the values of sustainability and justice.
Beckerpositions the role of information technology and computing in environmental sustainability, social justice, and the intersection of the two, and explains why designing IT for just sustainability is both technically and ethically challenging. Becker goes on to argue that computing could be aided by critical friends—disciplines that draw on critical social theory, feminist thought, and systems thinking—to make better sense of its role in society. Finally, Becker demonstrates that it is possible to fuse critical perspectives with work in computer science, showing new and fruitful directions for computing professionals and researchers to pursue.
Apple's AirPods have helped forge a multibillion-dollar market for true wireless hearable devices. The article employs media geology and political ecology to argue that AirPods exemplify the Capitalocene, a time where a planetary sociotechnical system based on ecologically unequal exchange benefits a privileged minority of humans while inflicting significant harms to humans and ecosystems that will persist across inhuman temporalities. These harms are inequitably distributed and are not typically experienced by those who can afford luxury items such as AirPods. While digital technologies are often mistaken for dematerialised objects that will enable infinite economic growth on a materially finite planet, examining the flows of energy, matter, labour and knowledge required for the production and maintenance of these devices comprehensively refutes these claims. AirPods are designed to function for just eighteen to thirty-six months of daily use before planned obsolescence renders AirPods as long-lived, toxic, electronic waste. Pending ‘right to repair’ legislation should prohibit the production of irreparable digital devices such as AirPods, as the right to repair an irreparable device is effectively meaningless.
Concentration levels of 16 organophosphate esters (OPEs) and 18 halogenated flame retardants (HFRs) were measured in airborne fine particulate matter (PM2.5) from an e-waste dismantling facility in Catalonia (Spain) to assess their occurrence, profiles and potential health risks. Three different areas from the facility were studied, including an area for cathodic ray-tube (CRT) TV dismantling, a grinding area, and the outdoor background. OPEs and HFRs were detected in all samples, with concentrations between 10.4 and 110 ng/m³ for OPEs and from 0.72 to 2213 ng/m³ for HFRs. The compounds with highest concentrations in both working areas were triphenyl phosphate (TPHP) and tris(2-chloroisopropyl) phosphate (TCIPP) for OPEs and decabromodiphenyl ether (BDE-209) for HFRs. Higher concentration levels were found in the CRT area compared to the grinding one, probably due to the lower ventilation and different types of e-waste being processed. OPEs were also detected in the solid e-waste from the facility, highlighting the need to evaluate HFR levels in e-waste before proceeding to its re-use. Estimated daily intakes via inhalation during workday were calculated, as well as carcinogenic and non-carcinogenic health risks, these being 25 and 50 times lower than threshold risk values in the worst cases, respectively. However, this calculated risk only considers the workday exposure via inhalation, while other routes of exposure (e.g., ingestion, dermal) could bring these values closer to threshold values.
Electronic products are an essential part of modern society, but their importance has perhaps never been as palpable as when the COVID-19 pandemic forced almost every aspect of human interaction to go online. However, the pandemic also revealed that the supply chains that provide crucial raw materials for manufacturing electronics are increasingly vulnerable to social, geopolitical, and technical disruptions. These vulnerabilities are likely to escalate in the future, due to global health crises, natural disasters, and global political instability, all of which will be magnified by looming climate change impacts. This study investigates potential supply chain disruption risks in the electronics sector by applying metrics that capture supply, demand, socio-political, and environmental risks in a multi-criteria framework to almost 40 metals and minerals that provide critical functionality to electronic products. Results illustrate that the material risks varied with the potential nature of the disruption. For example, in scenarios where disruptions led to price volatility or weakening of environmental regulations, highest risks were observed for precious metals such as gold, rhodium, platinum, and palladium. On the other hand, in scenarios where disruptions led to supply pressures or geopolitical tensions, cobalt, gallium, and key rare earth elements exhibited the highest risks. These metals are characterized by energy-intense manufacturing and highly concentrated geographic production, suggesting that recycling and supply chain diversification may alleviate some of the identified risks. The analysis also considers trade-offs that may occur across social, economic, and environmental dimensions. For example, cobalt, a critical component in lithium-ion batteries, has significant social impacts due to production concentration in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Shifting production to other regions may alleviate these risks but introduce new concerns about economic and environmental impacts.
This paper describes a series of collaborative studio explorations in examining waste. We assembled a design team to explore how designers might conceive, handle, and rework the material left behind as waste within an on-campus makerspace and adjacent design labs. We turned discarded 3D printing filament into a reparative glue for broken prints and dissolved cardboard boxes into a medium for pollinator habitats. We describe how attending to waste involves understanding the relationships that define it, like how a material comes to be categorized as biodegradable but is impossible to break down in practice. Bringing this insight to the design context, we introduce the tactic of ecological inversions, experiments in reversing material flows to expose the wider infrastructure on which they depend. We discuss how ecological inversions could invite design researchers to notice the infrastructural relationships that exceed the physical limitations of the makerspace, revealing challenges around complicity and legibility.
An examination of the global trade and traffic in discarded electronics that reframes the question of the “right” thing to do with e-waste.
The prevailing storyline about the problem of electronic waste frames e-waste as generated by consumers in developed countries and dumped on people and places in developing countries. In Reassembling Rubbish, Josh Lepawsky offers a different view. In an innovative analysis of the global trade and traffic in discarded electronics, Lepawsky reframes the question of the “right” thing to do with e-waste, mapping the complex flows of electronic materials. He counters the assumption that e-waste is a post-consumer problem, pointing out that waste occurs at all stages of electronic materials' existence, and calls attention to the under-researched world of reuse and repair.
Lepawsky explains that there are conflicting legal distinctions between electronic waste and non-waste, and examines a legal case that illustrates the consequences. He shows that patterns of trade do not support the dominant narrative of e-waste dumping but rather represent the dynamic ecologies of repair, refurbishment, and materials recovery. He asks how we know waste, how we measure it, and how we construe it, and how this affects our efforts to mitigate it. We might not put so much faith in household recycling if we counted the more massive amounts of pre-consumer electronic waste as official e-waste. Lepawsky charts the “minescapes,” “productionscapes,” and “clickscapes” of electronics, and the uneven “discardscapes” they produce. Finally, he considers both conventional and unconventional e-waste solutions, including decriminalizing export for reuse, repair, and upgrade; enabling ethical trade in electronics reuse, repair, refurbishment, and recycling; implementing extended producer responsibility; and instituting robust forms of public oversight.
Planned obsolescence is a strategy used to make products prematurely obsolete, leading to their replacement. The result is the over-exploitation of natural resources, increased waste and detrimental social impacts. It is a known practice in consumer electronics and affects other industries as they put profit before consequence.
Understanding Planned Obsolescence looks at the causes, costs and impacts of planned obsolescence. It considers the legal and economic frameworks to overcome the practice and how to mitigate its effects. It also unearths new patterns of production and consumption highlighting more sustainable development models. Including a wide range of case studies from Europe, USA and South America, Understanding Planned Obsolescence is a vital step forward for the future of business and academia alike.
Table of contents:
Section - ONE: Identifying the causes, consequences and history of planned obsolescence
Chapter - 01: Consumer society: A product of the growthist economy
Chapter - 02: Planned obsolescence as an instrument of the growthist economy and its socio-environmental consequences
Section - TWO: How to overcome planned obsolescence: from theory to practice
Chapter - 03: Sustainability in Economics and Law: The greening of sciences in the search for a new paradigm
Chapter - 04: The sustainability paradigm as the foundation to tackle planned obsolescence: New perspectives
Cultures of making have received broad attention within HCI studies of design and material production, surfacing the uneven social and political consequences of maker visions. Less explored but equally important in this scholarship is what it means to make within limits: what makers' tools would look like if they took seriously concerns for resource scarcity, provenance, and disposal. Deploying a mix of ethnographic and design methods, this paper identifies salvage practices as a core but under-recognized resource within an academic makerspace. To help open the conversation around making within limits, we propose a series of tools for salvage fabrication, an alternative design concept that emphasizes the interconnected material flows into and beyond local processes of material production.
An increasing number of non-profit groups and organizations have formed "libraries" of shared things to leverage the collaborative use of underutilized resources (e.g., power tools) for the benefit of local communities. Their key challenges are the transience and anonymity of their members, and how to nurture creative interactions among them. We designed and developed Roaming Objects, an interactive system aimed at supporting the capture and sharing of equipment-use experiences among these members. We deployed the system for two months in a tool-sharing cooperative to explore how it may help to address these challenges. We offer insights into how resource sharing cooperatives and collectives could be better supported, by proposing design opportunities that facilitate sharing both physical objects and digital information about their use.
HCI is focused on improving the interactions we have with technology and innovating new types of interactions, as well as expanding the types of people for whom those interactions are designed. Central to these efforts is the simultaneously empowering and contested construct of the "user." This paper examines what the construct of the user highlights, as well as what it conceals. We introduce post-userism, a perspective that simultaneously acknowledges the limits of, and proposes alternatives to, the central construct of the user as proxy for the "human" in HCI. Drawing on developments across the historical trajectory of HCI, we articulate how the user is enacted across four different levels of representation-systems, interface, design process, and the ideology and identify situations where the user breaks down. Synthesizing prior work, we offer a series of strategies for grappling with such situations. In doing so, we seek to overcome the limitations imposed by the user and develop a language that will aid in evolving the foundations of HCI by asking what, exactly, we place at the center of our scholarship and design.
This paper describes an integrated program of theoretical, ethnographic, and building work meant to explore posthumanist alternatives to questions around HCI creativity and design. We review recent theories in the humanities, social sciences, and HCI that argue for different ways of framing the relationship between human agents and the object world around them. We then describe a program of ethnographic work with artists who feature found and broken technologies as central methods and topics of work. Finally, we describe an installation and self-study project of our own, "Scale," that extends these lines of analysis through collaborative acts of building with broken and discarded technologies. We argue that such integrated programs of work offer one useful model for leveraging the theoretical, ethnographic and material dimensions of HCI work; and that the distinct "propensities" of found and broken objects can challenge and extend HCI notions of creativity and design itself.
In this note we discuss and argue about how taking things apart and disassembling can be meaningful practices in explorative design projects. In particular, we report on an explorative design exercise about taking apart an unfamiliar device. Relating to this design situation, we provide accounts for how collaborative hands-on experience can support reaching common ground and acquiring shared material understanding in an interdisciplinary design team through establishing a material brief. In the end we reflect and discuss how this may complement our practices regarding materials and interaction design.
Research in sustainable HCI has repeatedly pointed to the need for encouraging longer use of technology as part of the solution for stemming the tide of e-waste. Ways of achieving this goal remain elusive, however. We build upon previous research that considers the role of personal attachment in object ownership, and how this attachment might be leveraged to encourage longer use. We conducted a personal inventories study with 17 households in Switzerland, and use the findings to support and expand Odom et al.'s framework of attachment categories. We subsequently provided this framework to 3 designers and asked them to design novel technologies that encourage attachment. This exercise shed light on how they drew insight and inspiration from the framework, and how they integrated it into their design processes and design thinking.
E-waste is a generic term embracing various forms of electric and electronic equipment that is loosely discarded, surplus, obsolete, or broken [27]. When e-waste is improperly discarded as trash, there are predictable negative impacts on the environment and human health. Existing e-waste solutions range from designing for reuse to fabricating with eco-friendly decomposable materials to more radical critiques of current practices surrounding capitalism and consumerism. Complementary to theses efforts, this paper presents an accessible reuse framework that encourages creativity while maintaining personal ownership of e-waste. Through a series of online surveys of existing personal e-waste stockpiling behaviors combined with observational studies of existing reuse practices, we developed a design reuse vocabulary: materials, shapes, and operations to enable wide ranging and creative reuse of obsolete electronics by everyday people. We operationalized this vocabulary and evaluated its legibility and usefulness. As a result, we derived a novel reuse composition framework: reuse as-is, remake, and remanufacture designed to be accessible and to have broader impact in encouraging creative reuse across a wide range of e-waste types beyond those specifically used in our study. We believe these frameworks will be a catalyst for the creative reuse of e-waste.
This paper explores the nature and centrality of maintenance and repair ('M&R') work in the extension and sustainability of ICT infrastructure in the global South. Drawing from pragmatist traditions in CSCW and the social sciences at large, we develop a concept of 'repair worlds' intended to map the varieties and effects of such maintenance and repair activities. Empirically, our analysis builds on ethnographic fieldwork into local practices of maintenance and repair that have accompanied and supported the extension of mobile phone and computing infrastructure in the Kavango region of northeastern Namibia.
Electronic Waste (e-waste) Science and Advocacy at Agbogbloshie: The Making and Effects of “The World's Largest E-waste Dump”
- Grace Abena Akese
- Abena Akese Grace