The Pragmatics of Sustainable Unmaking: Informing Technology Design through e-Waste Folk Strategies

Video

Technology is becoming increasingly embedded within our material worlds, resulting in an exponential rise in the production and consumption of consumer electronics. Rapid innovations in technological systems reduce technology lifecycles, deprecating digital systems, rendering devices obsolete or incompatible with supporting infrastructure, resulting in the generation of electronic waste (e-waste). Sustainable unmaking practices are a promising avenue for harnessing and repurposing resources used in technology production, enabling us to move closer towards sustainable technology design. This paper presents an applied study investigating the pragmatics of sustainable unmaking, reporting on 12 semi-structured interviews conducted with domain experts engaged in unmaking with e-waste across diverse contexts in the consumer technology lifecycle. We present folk strategies — from rich first-hand accounts, revealing real, vivid, and current perspectives, as well as motivations, passions, and frustrations, of engaging with unmaking e-waste. These strategies inform five declarations as actionable provocations for unmaking in the HCI and design communities.