On wearing : a critical framework for valuing design's already made

A sustainable material culture is perhaps more about making new relationships than making new things. This paper explores the topography of what we are calling “Design’s already made,” including its artifacts, practices, and perceptions, via the lens of practice theory and in response to the problem of the largely unsustainable material cultures of design. Our investigation is framed by the term “wearing.” Wearing – as a recurrent form of engagement between bodies and designed artifacts or as an index of use and duration – is a multi-modal concept that brings abstract time into specific, situated material and aesthetic relations. We contrast “wearing” to the “object time” (Baudrillard 1998) of material and symbolic systems that make new, purportedly improved, but “inexperienced” things available to us in consumer culture. Wearing induces a critical practice of attending to those things that are declining from object time, which in this era of destructive wasting, need to be recalled, repaired, and repurposed. Wearing reveals that design, in spite of the widespread practice of trading completed designs, is better characterized as unfinished, potentially open to the value-creating processes of its users. We elaborate on this idea by drawing on a range of examples across the design disciplines.