Think Piece

E-waste is a growing problem with the planet producing over 50 million metric tons of it every year. At the global scale, this waste fills landfills and recycling centers, but in reality much of it lives in our homes, with an estimated 15% of the electronic devices in the home being broken or no longer used. These objects have clearly limited lifespans due to obsolescence by compatibility, supersession by superior technology, or limits to the materials of their physical form.

“Designing for the End of Life of IOT Objects” proposes that these objects can have value to their users beyond just their functional or performative values, such that users will keep around the broken and non-working devices as sentimental objects. Like many others, I have kept a few old phones, laptops, iPods, cables, usb sticks, memory cards, and other e-waste, traveling with me from apartment to apartment as I’ve moved over the past decade or so. Sometimes the more well-loved ones have an appreciable sentiment, or still have some usefulness to someone somewhere.

Furthermore, these devices contain data remnants about our past selves, old school assignments, texts with past crushes, and the albums and songs we loved as teenagers. What does this data say about ourselves back when these devices were cutting edge and new? How might we re-experience some of our past emotions through this data? In the way that the technological world moves so quickly, with only a quick glance to the past, maybe we can hope to learn about ourselves or remember ourselves by looking at the devices that hold the once precious data important to those experiences.

Design Friction’s Data Funerals provokes similar questions. The speculative project uses design fiction to explore rituals for data that is past its prime, invoking the ideas about funeral rites and requiems for the now defunct data and technological objects. Once we’ve reengaged this data, how can we give these devices a way to pass on to their next life as recycled materials, while still commemorating the place that they held in our lives? I’m interested in investigating a device for interacting with other devices–something that can help us give ceremony and ritual to divert these older, seldom-used technological relics from the wastestream and reenter the world as a new product.

Last Writes seeks to create a work of design fiction about a world where people care about and have attachment to their old devices, yet understand that it’s important for the resources within these devices to be used again. In the sense of Julian Bleecker, this machine is a “component parts for different kinds of near future worlds…They are complete specimens, but foreign in the sense that they represent a corner of some speculative world where things are different from how we might imagine the “future” to be. (p. 7)” This is a machine that exists in that alternate world or future where the passing on these old devices is ritualized. At the core of the functionality of the Last Writes machine is a language model that writes the obituary about the devices given meta-data and information collected about the device once connected. There is a heartwarming, almost overly tender quality to the extreme sentiment embodied by the words written by GPT3, injecting humor and liveliness to the world that this machine would inhabit.

Citations:

Data Funerals

Design Friction -Léa Lippera, Bastien Kerspern, Estelle Hary

http://www.datafunerals.com/about/

Design Fiction: A Short Essay on Design, Science, Fact and Fiction

Julian Bleecker

https://blog.nearfuturelaboratory.com/2009/03/17/design-fiction-a-short-essay-on-design-science-fact-and-fiction/

Susan Lechelt, Katerina Gorkovenko, Luis Lourenço Soares, Chris Speed, James K. Thorp, and Michael Stead. 2020. Designing for the End of Life of IoT Objects. In Companion Publication of the 2020 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference (DIS' 20 Companion). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 417–420. DOI:https://doi.org/10.1145/3393914.3395918