Short abstract published in the Caderno de Resumos Curtos (PDF) of the conference ESOCITE LA 2024.
This piece describes the research study reuse.city, part of my doctoral investigation on waste prevention through community-based practices of repair, reuse and upcycling. The study was an online co-design laboratory conducted in April 2011, with ten active participants from six countries. Along with workshops via videoconference, the co-design lab was accompanied of speculative prototyping pushing forward socially inclusive and participatory approaches to the assessment of the potential value of excess materials – things discarded, broken, inadequate or kept unused for any reasons. The reuse.city lab promoted in-depth and multi-faceted discussions, generating significant insights to be further developed in subsequent phases of research.
Keywords: Waste Prevention. Social Design. Regenerative Design. Social Innovation.
This piece reports on reuse.city, an online co-design lab conducted in 2021 as part of my doctoral investigation at Northumbria University (UK). My research focuses on practices of reuse – namely repairs, upcycling, and re-circulation of excess materials in contemporary urban scenarios. The underlying objective of the investigation is to explore ways to reshaping and re-imagining how cities handle such materials, seeking to support community-based alternatives that are more appropriate in social, environmental and cultural terms than solely industry-driven waste management.
More than managing waste to make it disappear efficiently, a central aspect of my investigation is understanding what are the skills, processes and forms of knowledge involved in assessing the potential value of things discarded or unused, and how to act on that potential. I am conscious and intent that whatever solutions emerge from my studies, they must always recognise and aid the hard work carried out by people and organisations involved with waste prevention at a local level. In other words, if I contribute to developing technologies that help evaluate and act on excess materials, such technologies should strive not to replace those people who already organically perform that work. Instead, I want to learn with them how to augment their work capability in convivial ways and, when possible, help new generations access the information necessary to become skilled, in order to help their communities thrive.
In its core, reuse.city was a co-design lab combining open-source methods and reflective prototyping, borrowing elements from participatory research methods to expand the understanding of how materials are put back in use in different contexts, and how. It focused on engaging with people with lived experience in activities related to the reuse of materials, repair communities, circular economy and related topics.
Alongside the workshops and co-designing with participants, I was also developing speculative prototypes of design concepts created in earlier stages of my PhD research. Based on two research studies, I had created eight design concepts exploring possibilities to reframe the discussion about urban excess under a perspective of waste prevention.
Through the co-design lab, I intended to build bridges between those elements, generating public documentation and keeping constant communication with the lab participants. It would also be complemented by my ongoing auto-ethnographic exploration of the reuse of materials in Berlin, where I had moved to months earlier. That additional layer of investigation enabled me to focus on how cultural and infrastructural differences manifest in the reuse of materials in different cities. Notes and reflections from that exploration informed the lab sessions and my prototypes, and were discussed with the participants.
The co-design lab was planned as an open-ended process to take place via online workshops. Through them, participants with diverse levels of involvement with repair, reuse, and waste would be asked to describe their experiences, prompted by ideas emerging from my previous research studies. They would also follow the progress of my prototyping of a subset of the design concepts. I expected to discuss with them the implications of using those concepts in real-world scenarios. Reflecting on the participatory community-driven research framing I adopted for this part of my research, I kept the concrete plans intentionally as open-ended as possible. With that, I sought to involve the participants in contributing to shaping the study since its inception. The main goals of the lab would then be:
From the onset, there was a range of potential outcomes I knew to expect. For instance, co‐designing updated versions of the concepts, or generating novel ways of using technologies to augment society’s ability to reuse a larger volume of materials. Owing to the COVID-19 times (the lab took place in April 2021), the workshops were to be held exclusively online via videoconferencing. Additional interaction would occur through other means, to be decided with the participants.
A call for participants was sent out via social media and partner projects. I have also personally invited people I thought relevant, and took on suggestions from colleagues and other participants about whom to invite. At the end of the recruiting period, 29 persons from ten countries on four continents signed up for the study by filling out the consent form. Ultimately, not all the individuals who signed up have engaged with the lab’s activities. There was considerable attendance, nonetheless. Part of the group that signed up (10 individuals) engaged actively. They were three participants from the USA, two from Brazil, two from the UK, one from Uganda, one from India and one from the Netherlands. Some others watched the sessions as an audience or reacted only through email. An early look at the list of participants indicated that they had diverse levels of familiarity with the research topics and, in some cases, with my previous studies.
The study was planned to happen for four weeks, though, in the end, it was slightly extended. The shape of reuse.city was left open to be debated and agreed upon with the participants. As hinted above, even if I was steering the study in the explicit and clear role of a PhD researcher, the idea was to allow plenty of room for genuinely collective peer construction. We started with an elementary set of definitions, on top of which I expected to build:
Even the practical meaning of the definition I chose for the study – an ‘online co-design lab’ – was subject to discussion early on. I sent an email and a video introducing the general format and posing the question ‘what a co-design lab should be’ to the participants, and sent out an online questionnaire about their preferences for interacting alongside the video calls.
Nine participants replied to the survey about communication. They all agreed to participate in communications in parallel with the live calls. The modes of interaction that got more votes were an email discussion group (5 votes), and a group on the messenger application Telegram (4 votes). Both groups were created right away, and all the participants received invitations.
Given the positive response to the introductory video, I decided to keep creating and sending what I called ‘video fragments’ about my research in the following weeks. Breaking down different parts of the investigation into smaller-sized videos proved to be an efficient way to offer context while not taking up the time of the online meetings. The participants could watch them at their own pace, leading to the meetings. During the co-design lab, I sent a total of five video fragments. Five emails with guidance, organisation, and contents were also sent to the participants.
We had seven video calls during the lab. Nine participants attended actively, presenting their projects and engaging in conversations during the sessions. Another two attended occasionally, but had connectivity problems. One other participant was scheduled to present his initiative and had to cancel due to health issues. In agreement with all participants, I would also record the sessions and send the files to all other group members so that those who did not attend could watch them. Two participants who could not attend any call reported having watched at least one recorded session, and engaged in conversations via group messaging. After the period of collective activities was finished, I sent a final message to the participants to wrap up and indicate my plans following the lab.
Those who didn’t make it to the final call were offered alternative ways to provide feedback afterwards. They received the video fragments describing the prototypes and could add comments to a collaborative online whiteboard, kept open for two more weeks. A survey was also sent out and answered by two other participants.
During the calls, I took notes on an interactive whiteboard using the Miro platform. For the final meeting, I created another collaborative board on Miro, and invited participants to collaborate and post content. I documented the calls, my reflections, and auto-ethnography in text, notes, photos, and sketches. In line with best practices of open-source projects, I published all the contents generated during the lab on a GitHub repository: text notes, images, code for the prototypes, snapshots of the Miro boards, and video fragments. The recorded sessions were only shared with the participants. The transcriptions of the meetings generated 240 pages of text, only accessed by me.
In parallel with the calls and other interactions with participants, I was also prototyping reassembled versions of a subset of the concept ideas. As mentioned earlier, I chose the ones that could act as boundary objects, by embedding and expanding the discussion on how to understand, augment and replicate the skills, data, and knowledge involved in assessing the potential reuse of materials. When the planned period of the lab was coming to an end, I set out to promote discussions and collect participant feedback on how my prototypes were evolving. A wrap-up meeting was scheduled for the fourth week, and was mostly attended by participants who had been to previous sessions. The group was introduced to updated versions of three of my design concepts:
Through the activities of reuse.city, I was able to discuss with participants the prototypes and collect their insights and ideas. After the four weeks of collective activities, I collected my notes and focused further on prototyping.
The conversations with participants covered multiple and complementary human experiences in planning and conducting activities of reuse in diverse contexts. They point to a series of recurrent topics, listed below. Those topics were organically incorporated in my prototyping activities, and would also inform the design of further research activities for the following stages of research. The topics were:
As well as experimenting with technologies that allowed interested parties to assess the potential value of discarded materials, the online sessions brought forth the discussion about what kind of urban facilities are needed to promote the reuse of materials, what were its precedents and relevant references, as well as main desirable characteristics.
Through reuse.city, I was able to design updated concepts enriched by the conversations and participant interactions. Two of them were turned into prototypes following the period of the online activities: an experimental implementation of the Universal Registry of Things called ThingWiki, and a demonstration of technologies that would enact E-I in the form of a workbench machine. My prototypes were functional design concepts, based on open-source software and hardware. They enabled me to unpack issues associated with the reuse of materials in terms of incentive systems, culture and behaviour, as well as access to data, information and experiences.
My PhD research reflects on waste prevention through convivial and community-based practices of reuse in the form of repair, upcycling and re-circulation. The conversations during the reuse.city lab were particularly relevant in that context. A central point was the importance of physical infrastructure providing access to tools and equipment. That was incorporated in further stages of investigation.
A central part of the discussion about physical spaces for reuse is that storage is crucial. It is not rare that an unused object of today will be useful tomorrow. Or conversely, a broken product requires time to be worked on, by receiving spare parts or new parts being tailored to it. Storage for works-in-progress and things that can become useful in the future could be understood as a reserve of potential uses – a resource in itself.
As pointed out by the participants, reuse logistics depends on more than just space to keeping materials waiting to be reused. Transporting them is another challenge. Also indicated by participants, repair shops are disappearing, with few exceptions. As a result, taking things to be repaired is increasingly more cumbersome, as one needs to travel longer distances to achieve it. While that is already problematic with small items, it becomes impractical for larger objects.
Another theme of reflection from the meetings with participants is the governance of solutions inspired by the Universal Registry of Things. Instead of creating (yet another) centralised database, the conversations suggested adopting a distributed approach. In the case of a Universal Registry of Things, generating and maintaining it in a distributed way helps accessing and validating fragmented and constantly changing information. Its structure should then welcome alternative methods of validation and maintenance of data, be it through automation (AI, crawlers, bots) or via institutional bodies. In that context, legislation on the ‘right to repair’ has recently been gaining ground in many parts of the world. That could be an excellent opportunity to attribute to new or existing regulatory bodies the responsibility for making corporations and other organisations adhere to a hypothetical distributed protocol for data on how to reuse things. Policy inspired by such legislation can enable the creation of regulatory mechanisms and conflict-resolution methods.
In addition to such data infrastructure and applications, it’s interesting to address the capacity of evaluating the potential reuse of unused materials. The capacity to sustain the work of professionals exclusively dedicated to that kind of activity is highly contingent on local conditions. Not every location has enough demand, or an appropriate economic configuration to enable it. On the other hand, assessing the potential value of reusing excess materials is arguably an ordinary practice in diverse contexts, albeit often fragmented or inconsistent. That role can potentially be performed in a networked way.
The questions that emerged from reuse.city were then how to organise social systems to promote convivial forms of evaluating and acting on available excess materials. Additionally, what could be the incentives in terms of regulations and legislation, and how to influence culture and the public opinion to promote reuse prior to waste management. I started addressing them in following phases of my doctoral research.