Designing with Waste: A Situated Inquiry into the Material Excess of Making

This paper describes a series of collaborative studio explorations in examining waste. We assembled a design team to explore how designers might conceive, handle, and rework the material left behind as waste within an on-campus makerspace and adjacent design labs. We turned discarded 3D printing filament into a reparative glue for broken prints and dissolved cardboard boxes into a medium for pollinator habitats. We describe how attending to waste involves understanding the relationships that define it, like how a material comes to be categorized as biodegradable but is impossible to break down in practice. Bringing this insight to the design context, we introduce the tactic of ecological inversions, experiments in reversing material flows to expose the wider infrastructure on which they depend. We discuss how ecological inversions could invite design researchers to notice the infrastructural relationships that exceed the physical limitations of the makerspace, revealing challenges around complicity and legibility.