The research project Material Ecologies of Design welcomes everyone to join the one-day symposium Radical Reuse: Aesthetics, Scale, and Limits.
The symposium is free to attend but requires registration in order to provide lunch, coffee, and snacks. If you cannot attend after registering, please notify the organisers by email.
Extraction, innovation, and aesthetic desire are powerful forces that have collectively reshaped our world over the past century. This decade must seek alternatives to the consequences of modernization. Recycling and reuse of materials have long been part of design practice, even when historically motivated more by economic than ecological concerns. What historical practices can inspire new, less wasteful design methods? What are the challenges and opportunities when the design field scales up experimental reuse practices into real-world solutions for industry? And how can designers, activists, and communities resist the commodification of waste that is increasingly becoming another extractive market?
If design is to move from a logic of mining to one of reuse, it will require a shift toward an ethos of elimination. Designing with extractive materials will not stop overnight, but reducing their consumption requires a transition toward designing without—or even designing out—extractive materials.
The symposium Radical Reuse aims to understand design as a densely textured constellation of past, present, and future across changing regimes of value and revalorization. It brings together researchers from multiple fields to discuss the challenges and opportunities of a reuse paradigm.
Throughout the day, historians, architects, scientists, curators, filmmakers, designers, and activists will give short presentations with concrete examples of reuse, focusing on aesthetics, scale, and the limits of reuse, in the past, present, and future.
The symposium comprises short presentations from a diverse group of researchers and practitioners: Grace Lees‑Maffei, Daniel A. Barber, Kate Fletcher, Adam Przywara, Kim Förster, Line Ramstad, Alexandra Cruz, Kshitija Mruthyunjaya, Hans Baumann, Christian John Engelsen, Stian Rossi, Daniela Kröhnert, Lukas Allner, Petra Lilja, Matthew Dalziel, Jomy Joseph, and Armelle Breuil.