Namrata Primlani

As the importance of minimising e-waste and increasing sustainability increase, exploring the design matters impacting the transience of digital technologies has become a key concern. In this workshop we will explore this through the metaphorical lens of the lives, deaths, and afterlives of electronic objects. The workshop creatively engages with this by participants creating obituaries for IoT objects and postcards from the afterlife that will help us question the emotional, ethical, aesthetic and ecological implications of objects reaching the end of their life. Drawing upon our work for the EPSRC Fixing the Future Project, we anticipate that the discussions and collaborations that emerge through the workshop will generate design themes that contribute to the wider agendas and communities advocating for the Right-to-Repair of IoT devices globally.

The way consumer Internet of Things (IoT) devices are built is leading to electronic waste (eWaste) growth. This arises from planned obsolescence, bundling of ‘smartness’ creating more routes to device failure, and lacking hardware modularity and repairability. Understanding how to best tackle these issues requires an interdisciplinary perspective bridging design, law, and the social science research. The legal landscape is shifting, encouraging design of repairable and long-lasting IoT, and reducing routes to redundancy. This one-day workshop explores the interface between design and legal research to address the socio-technical challenges around designing sustainable consumer IoT devices. The workshop will: map out the societal, legal, and environmental implications of IoT; envision the opportunities and barriers to designing more sustainable IoT; and share best practice and tools to help move towards more sustainable IoT futures.