This paper explores the notion of 'use' as design iteration, and the agency of'users' as everyday designers who through forms of reuse continually transgress the rules determined by the objects materiality. In doing so pushing the boundaries of their significance and prototyping futures otherwise.
Paper long abstract:
This paper interrogates the explicit and implicit rules imposed by designers through the uses that they attribute to their designed products. After unpacking some of the design limitations and politics of these rules, the paper problematises the social and material implications of these in sustainability terms. Building on Redström (2008) 'RE: definitions of use', and positioned from a design research perspective at the intersection between Participatory (PD), Anthropological (DA) and Everyday Design (ED) fields, I propose an unbounded redefinition of reuse. While this proposal offers a critical examination of design's professions complicit practices in fostering cultures of disposability, it also offers an open-ended and collaborative counter-narrative illustrated in the everyday design interventions that people make with things as they shift their forms, functions and symbolic values through artful acts of reuse. In doing so, challenging disposability and making possible novel design iterations, prototyping futures otherwise. Drawing from two design ethnographic examples from Colombia and Australia, the paper aims to moreover engage with and contribute to the recent wave in design research that is advancing knowledge with the global souths.