Giving Form to Entanglements with Yarn
After reading and analysing hundreds of pages of policy documents on waste management, I felt:
What if the entanglements of regulations, design, and sustainablity practice weren’t just words on paper, but threads you could hold in your hand?
How do you visualize law? And what happens when it tangles with your everyday life – and design processes? Exploring these questions resulted in the pictorial “Yarn as a Means to Give Form to Entanglements of Regulation, Design and Sustainability Practices”.
Abstract
“When designing with and for complex sustainability processes like waste management, it is crucial to understand digital technologies as entangled with broader systemic factors, including physical infrastructures and regulatory instruments. Within the case of organic household waste management, this pictorial aims at making such relations visible through design methods. We have used yarn to represent the different threads of these entanglements and defined specific configurations: tangles, knots, loose ends, and frayed threads. We discuss how the design practice of giving form to these entanglements can make complex relations between digital technology, infrastructures, and regulatory instruments more visible and actionable for HCI, and explore how digital technologies are – and can be – made to work within them.”