Gazodexing: Methods for Design Practice in the Territory of Waste

This research investigates pluralistic notions of waste, its effects, and implications for design practice and for the operationalisation of (un)sustainability. Waste as a site of complexity reveals critical entanglements that are inextricable from the political economy, socio-material agencies, and the technical and cultural milieu which Design is part producer of and reproduced by. Designing in relation to waste is a contested territory, one that is frequently addressed through technical solutionism, critique and speculation, whether utopian or dystopian. Resisting the urge to excise complexity, this practice-led research brings design into the messiness of waste to envision new tools and modes for working through it while also reassessing my relationship to practice. Against this onto-ethical backdrop is a creative practice concerned with ways of building a particular capacity for responding – response-ability – through design, playfulness, and metaphorical metamorphoses. Taking a heutagogical approach, the exploration with waste reveals ‘intrinsic’ qualities from which to enlarge concerns of practice through literature-oriented and exploratory modes of (self-)inquiry, studio-based material experimentation, theorising through craft, writing and diagrammatic models. This practice builds on the empirical and abstract elements, design processes and methodological patterns uncovered through a series of projects. Emerging from this research is a model of, and for, practice – what I call Gazodexing. Inspired by waste’s fascinating ability to traverse boundaries, this model forms as a research and practice methodology. Drawing from a gaze developed through a personal creaturely metamorphosis into an eight-legged mite – Demodex folliculorum – Gazodexing arises from piecing together the outcomes and insights that the research yielded. This model is a ludic speculation that requires extraneous inputs, constrictions, and roleplaying to induce a personal response that accounts for the ‘impersonal’ – an aptitude for response-ability toward the other centres beyond ours. It invites a mindset of nourishing and moving through the questions rather than advancing answers or solutions, least of all a normative and universalised set of practices to deal with waste – an/other to ‘ecological design practice’. This research contributes methodological knowledge to two fields. To the broader field of Waste Studies, it presents an instantiation of how a designer may approach, understand, and contemplate the multifaceted topic of waste. To creative practice and design research, it offers a methodological example of how to induce, and experience, a different gaze in order to contend with complex systems such as waste. These methods coalesce in Gazodexing and form as a way of challenging, re-learning, and transfiguring practice. Presenting new ways of ‘doing practice’ to attend to intractable problems, this research recasts it as a ‘practice of doing’, of attentively tuning in and responding to a situation in flux.