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Short abstract

This paper considers how anticipations of future material residues serve as ethical guides within regenerative material design. Makers attempt to build new materials as a foil to toxic petro-presents with guilt-free afterlives but remain concerned with known unknowns in their innovation's futures.

Long abstract

Regenerative material designers and makers are often obsessed with material residues - both inherited and those to come. In their everyday lives, they trace out toxic futures: clothes whose chemical treatments leech when washed, disposable cups which will linger for thousands of years, tyres which shed particles with every turn. This understanding of materiality as ethical and as future-focused forms the foundation for their broader project: the (re)making of themselves as responsible producers and the redesign of the material world in a responsive and responsible way. Against this backdrop, they imagine and prototype alternatives: materials that biodegrade, bio-assimilate, or otherwise promise benign disappearance.

This paper delves into how regenerative designers understand their work in relation to future traces; how they understand more positive wordings through disappearing, decomposable, bio-benign materials; but also how toxic material traces haunt new production methods. This is on two fronts. On one front, their efforts are constrained by legacy infrastructures: standards, supply chains, and fabrication processes calibrated for petrochemically derived materials. On another, uncertainty remains in even the most careful interventions as end-of-life questions linger and designers remain acutely aware that their materials’ futures can never be fully known. The “guilt-free” afterlife aspired to proves less a destination than an ongoing ethical negotiation, where goodness must be continually re-evaluated in light of potential residues.

Through this lens, regenerative material design appears as a site where innovation residues are active forces shaping how responsibility, foresight, and care are practiced under conditions of partial knowledge and material doubt.