A Materials Library as a Method to Explore the Conditions for Regenerative Technologies and Systems

Inspired by the regenerative message of Nordmarka’s Future Library, whose books will only be printed once the trees planted for this purpose have reached maturity (100 years), we present the Materials Library for the Digital World. This Library forms an entry into the invisible world of materials that become our digital technologies. Each material in the Library will become an entry point on a Gigamap (Sevaldson, 2011, 2018) that will visualise the complexity of connections between the different sites of resource extraction, manufacturing, use, and discarding of digital devices. In this paper, we present some background on materials libraries, followed by a short presentation of our design framework and some of the concepts that will inspire the design of the Materials Library. These concepts are entanglement of nature and technology, visualising the invisible, open, nomadic, pluriverse, and slow. We understand our Materials Library as a creative method to provoke (Jones, 2014) – to question the normalcy and business-as-usual of the digital world and as a design method that enables the conditions for regenerative technologies and systems to emerge.