Recoding abandoned products : student visual designers experiment to sustain product lives and values

This conference paper outlines the development, delivery and evaluation of a student project for visual communicators in a second year teaching unit where students are investigating the communication contexts of contemporary consumer values and the material and symbolic waste to which design contributes. The student exercise is part of a pedagogical strategy to seed education about sustainable design practices and is in response to an ongoing research project investigating the role of visual communications design in supporting more enduring relationships with existing products and the value-creating practices of users. The authors' research draws in part on the sustainable design theory of Fry (2009) and the experimental work of Dutch design group Eternally Yours. The students were asked to employ the visual strategy of 'receding' to reconceptualise abandoned products, a strategy of inserting new meanings into existing sign pairings of image signifier and referent and reformulating their value constructions. Receding bears a strong relation to the familiar critical practices used in 'culture jamming' to disrupt the commercial construction of values in branding culture. As it encapsulates critical potential, receding was presented to students as an opportunity for visual experiment and to transform the aesthetic expression of already existing products. The ambition for this student project was that it would open up reflection on the sensory complexities and competencies of everyday practices of product use that might sustain product values and involve students in unveiling the experiential knowledge(s) of users and their artefacts. Primarily, receding involves a strategic negotiation of how visual communicators can draw from and frame these reflections. It also involves the possibility to learn as both consumers and designers who implement use practices that evolve significantly, if incrementally over time. As such, practices can be linked to past competencies that are available for salvage, modification and redirection. This conference paper provided the researchers with the opportunity to reflect on the students' creative responses to the challenges of receding within a learning context and evaluate the project's ability to advance the research findings, as well as refine it for future iterations. With exciting insights into the types of products, skills and experiences to which the students have access for their revisualisations, their creative outcomes revealed how challenging it was to find alternatives to the insistent tendencies of product advertising to fetishise novelty and perfect form.