Un/Making the Plastic Straw: Designerly Inquiries into Disposability

Abstract

This article proposes un/making as a designerly response to urgent environmental issues. By focusing on the simultaneous constructive and destructive aspects of design, this effort attempts to challenge design’s dominant focus on making new things. The implications and potentialities of un/making are explored through a designerly inquiry into ongoing and emerging attempts to ban the plastic straw. Based on this inquiry, the article proposes an approach to un/making that is driven by speculative, what if questions, informed by the history of the plastic straw: from coming into being to becoming preferable and now emerging as a matter of concern. Through a series of speculative design artifacts, the authors articulate matters at stake in the un/making of the plastic straw. They also show how these matters are a stake in the un/making of disposability as part of a preferable future. Rather than proposing one preferable future, the article highlights the frictions that emerge in un/making.

Keywords:

• design
• unmaking
• plastics
• drinking straw
• disposability
• revival
• speculative design

Introduction

Design as a discipline and practice is future-oriented and predominantly concerned with making change through making new things. In response to emerging and urgent environmental concerns, there are also calls within design to rethink this orientation and to unlearn, undesign (Coombs, McNamara, and Sade 2019), and design away (Tonkinwise 2014). We can think of these as calls to attend to the legacy of design more thoroughly and to rethink and rework some of the harmful relations design has participated in generating. These calls challenge progressivist ways of thinking and doing that have dominated design practices and research.

Whereas these calls tend to be theoretical and conceptual, this article is based on an inquiry into un/making that is done through design and situated in emerging, ongoing debates and proposals to unmake and ban plastic disposable products, such as plastic drinking straws.¹ This is done to articulate the implications and potentialities of bringing these calls into practice. This article thereby seizes the opportunity of engaging with ongoing un/makings in society and combining them with a research through design approach (Redström 2017; Koskinen et al. 2011).

The article begins by situating un/making as part of an emerging body of work within design research and beyond. Following that, it positions the study within research through design, with a particular focus on how speculative and critical design can be part of ongoing and lively debates. Research through design is often driven by what if questions that are explored and answered through various material engagements, such as experiments, speculative objects, and prototypes. Because this work is concerned with un/making, we combine such designerly what if questions with inquiries into what was. Therefore, the article has a historically oriented section on design, plastics, and disposability. We then give an account of how the plastic straw has moved from being preferred to becoming a matter of concern.

The section on our own inquiries into un/making presents a series of speculative design artifacts that have emerged from an iterative process of learning from historical sources and ongoing engagements with un/making the plastic straw. The design proposals do not necessarily offer something completely new but draw on past and emerging alternatives to the plastic straw. Each artifact articulates different matters at stake in the un/making of the plastic straw and, more broadly, disposability. The matters at stake are organized through the following four themes: temporality, caring relationships, microbiological co-living, and aftermath. These themes, which are used to narrate the empirical part of the article, were also used when this work was exhibited in a group show on experiments and utopia at Ystad Art Museum in 2018.² The design examples are followed by an argument for the importance of making differences explicit.

The main focus of this article is on insights gained through designerly explorations of un/making in the context of the plastic drinking straw, which could be relevant to designers interested in practices of un/making more generally. The conclusion articulates both implications and potentialities of the particular approach to un/making that has been explored in this paper. Whereas design can accomplish important work in processes of un/making – making matters at stake visible, tangible, and debatable – the article ends by also pointing out the limits of un/making through design. These limits call for engaging not only with ongoing unmakings through laws and entrepreneurial initiatives, but also with alliances across sectors and, in particular, with alternative economies.

Un/Making in and through Design

Although design has historically been concerned with spatiality, the future has more recently become central within design discourse, valuing newness and innovation (Mazé 2007). Design is figured as a particular mode of future-making “aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones” (Simon 1996, 130) through creating new things, services, and systems. Furthermore, it is often assumed that design can offer proper solutions to all kinds of problems, including social and environmental concerns (Coombs, McNamara, and Sade 2019).

In recent years, however, it has been increasingly recognized that design not only solves problems or makes futures but also participates in unmaking futures and generating problems; a condition that Fry (2009) articulated as defuturing. Through the objective of making the future through making new things, other things and alternative futures are replaced, left behind, and closed off (Tonkinwise 2014). In fact, Tonkinwise (2019, 75) suggests that “designers do not change existing situations into preferred ones; they destroy what currently exists by replacing it with a preferable one.” This destructive aspect of design, however, has largely been overshadowed by the creative side of design (Tonkinwise 2014), which, in turn, has participated in generating urgent environmental damage, such as plastic accumulating in oceans, landfills, and our own bodies (Gabrys, Hawkins, and Michael 2013).

As a response to these urgent environmental concerns emerging in the aftermath of industrialized design (Lindström 2020; Lindström and Ståhl 2019), there are calls to rework and rethink the progressivist imaginaries often enacted through design that presuppose infinite resources (see, for example, Coombs, McNamara, and Sade 2019; Fry 2009; Tonkinwise 2014, 2019). While embracing some aspects of design, books such as Undesign (Coombs, McNamara, and Sade 2019) call for hesitation regarding the assumption that solutions to problems always “require the application of more design” (Coombs, McNamara, and Sade 2019, 7) and that design has the capacity to provide relevant responses to all kinds of problems. Instead, the book can be read as an attempt to unlearn some aspects of design and suggests that “sometimes it is possible to achieve a better result by untying or undoing something” (McNamara, Coombs, and Sade 2019, 3).

In one of the chapters of Undesign, Tonkinwise (2019) calls for de-progressive design, which aims to destroy unsustainable ways of living and working that have previously been deemed preferable. This objective to unmake or destroy unsustainable things and practices could be interpreted as a turn towards the past. However, as Tonkinwise (2019) points out, it should not be understood as an attempt to travel back in time or to restore entire lifeworlds but rather as a diffractive practice that seeks to undestroy sustainable aspects of what has previously been deemed un-preferable, adjusting them to present circumstances. Through this process, we might also come to realize that the practices we seek to restore were never fully unmade but are still in use on different scales (Shove 2012) or in other parts of the world (Mazé 2019). Cars have, for example, replaced bicycles in many cities. As Shove (2012) points out, this does not mean that the infrastructures and practices of bicycling are completely gone; they still exist, but often in altered forms. A shift towards more sustainable transportation in cities could therefore be approached as a matter of revival and restoration rather than as an attempt to make something completely new (Shove 2012).

In that sense, these calls to undo and unmake should not simply be understood as a step away from something; they should also be understood as a kind of opening for something else to emerge. Importantly, Feola (2019, 979), in the context of degrowth, described the practice of unmaking as “processes that are deliberately activated in order to ‘make space’ (temporally, spatially, materially, and/or symbolically) for radical alternatives that are incompatible with dominant modern capitalist configurations.”

Based on this emerging body of work on unmaking, we propose a turn towards un/making, which considers both the creative and destructive aspects of design. In other words, the practice of un/making suggests that we approach future-making not only through making new things but also through unmaking unsustainable materialities, practices, and imaginaries. We have added a slash between un and making to remind ourselves and others that there are always paradoxes and conflicts in what is understood and experienced as preferable and by whom.

Our proposal is, however, not to move away from making all together. Instead, we suggest that, much like all processes of making come with the unmaking of something else, making can play a central role in the desire to unmake something. For example, getting rid of the plastic straw might require making alternatives to the plastic straw. To understand these dynamics is important: as designers, we are faced with calls to ban and in other ways get rid of things, such as disposable plastic items, which are now emerging as un-preferable.

To further the understanding of what un/making might imply in practice, we set out to explore un/making through design. Our exploration of un/making is, in other words, not only a theoretical exercise but also an attempt to put insights into practice and to make learnings through practice.

Although our focus is on un/making through design, we want to emphasize the need for an oscillation between various ways of learning and producing knowledge. It is common within design to situate and position one’s design in relation to other existing and emerging designs. However, we suggest that, for designers concerned with un/making, it is helpful not only to research ongoing attempts to make or unmake something but also to familiarize oneself with the history of that which one aims to un/make. How did it come into being? By whom, why, and by what mechanisms was it made into something preferable? What did it participate in making and unmaking? In the case of un/making the plastic drinking straw, this involved researching the history of plastics and disposable plastic straws, as well as emerging public debates that had changed the dominant culture concerning plastic straws, from the preferable into a matter of concern. Before introducing parts of this research, we situate our work in research through speculative and critical design.

Research through Speculative and Critical Design

Since design research started to develop as a research discipline, there have been ongoing debates on the role of design and design practice in the production of knowledge. Through articulations such as research through design (Frayling 1993), constructive design research (Koskinen et al. 2011), and programmatic design research (Koskinen, Binder, and Redström 2008), design experiments, design interventions, and prototyping have become central parts of the design research process. Although the character of these articulations might differ in terms of focus and approach, this type of design-driven research often regards the design process as a main vehicle for inquiry (Broms and Runberger 2021). In this sense, design-driven research bears similarities to a regular design process. A central difference, however, is that there is a theoretical framing that surrounds these designerly inquiries and explorations (Koskinen et al. 2011).

Although our inquiry was done through design, it was not primarily done for design (DiSalvo 2016). This means that insights are not necessarily meant to be fed into the next iteration of a design process but, rather, to offer insight into the ongoing and potential un/making of the plastic straw, as well as practices of un/making more broadly. Thereby, we partly align with critical and speculative design, which aim to spark debate and reflection on societal issues through design. This is often accomplished through the articulation of what if scenarios that comprise what if questions and a designerly exploration of their potential implications (Wangel, Broms, and Runberger 2021). Rather than providing predictions of more or less likely futures, critical and speculative design aims to give shape and form to alternative presents or futures in ways that make them imaginable, debatable, and cared for. Although critical and speculative design have been used to approach a range of different kinds of futures, it is common practice within these areas of design to engage with new and emerging technologies, such as mobile telecommunication (Dunne 2008), drones (DiSalvo 2016), and in vitro meat (Galloway and Caudwell 2019), as well as design objects and services that make use of these technologies in potential futures. These objects are rarely meant to be used but should, according to Dunne and Raby (2013), be scientifically plausible and exist in a space between the probable and the plausible.

In our designerly inquiry into the un/making of the plastic straw, we have not, in line with speculative and critical design practices, intended to design for large-scale productions. Instead, our design was meant to further the already ongoing and lively debate on a possible ban on plastic straws. A crucial difference between our designs and most other speculative and critical designs, however, is that we did not start off with a new and emerging technology or in lifeworlds of which this new and emerging technology could become part. Instead, our design could be seen as a speculation on how to get rid of something; a material that has been part of innovations but that has also been shown to have harmful effects. Consequently, most of our research focused on the history of the plastic drinking straw and what made it a preferable thing. In addition, we have drawn on ongoing public debates that enact the plastic drinking straw as a matter of concern.

Plastics and Disposability

Plastics and design are intimately connected. They have both been part of enacting futures, and, over the course of their relationship, they have also performed different material–temporal relationships. In this section, we are primarily interested in how plastics, specifically thermoplastics, have participated in the making of disposability, and how this particular enactment is being challenged today. This section is written from a predominantly Western perspective, oscillating mainly between the USA and Europe (in particular Sweden).

When the first polymer, Bakelite, was introduced, it was praised for its durability and ability to resist decay. It was often used as a lighter, cheaper alternative to natural materials, such as ivory, which were traded from colonies to empires (Meikle 1995). In the 1930s, thermoplastics became more commonly used. These new plastic bonds were not only malleable but could also be melted and reshaped in new ways. Indeed, they were not only imitating the world but also explicitly giving shape to worlds that had not been imaginable before. The understanding of plastics as malleable, as a passive material for designers to shape according to their desires, took off (Bensaude Vincent 2013). The offering of what seemed like endless possibilities and resources made plastics into a utopian material that would rid humans of the constraints posed by nature (Bensaude Vincent 2013; Davis 2015).

The introduction of thermoplastics, however, not only strengthened the discourse on the malleability of plastics. It also allowed for the use of plastics in disposable products such as plastic wrapping, cups, and straws. Hawkins (2018) wrote that the introduction of disposable products relied on a specific relation to time, where the value of a product after its immediate use was ignored. In other words, through disposable products, plastics became part of an enactment of ephemerality rather than durability, which resulted in a form of presentism.

This unique form of presentism actualized a temporal ontology in which immediacy, the time of now, was implicitly underwritten by the repetitive temporality of turnover. Repetition and continual return was a process that reassured consumers that everything would be immediately and always available, nothing would be used up; plastic and what it contained would appear, disappear and reappear in a never-ending cyclical pattern. In this way, the presentism of disposability was paradoxical: the pleasure and value of immediacy also produced an unending now. (Hawkins 2018, 100)

Furthermore, Hawkins (2018) argued that this enactment of presentism obscures the afterlife of these products. Plastic cups and wrappings do not invite consumers to care for the future of these material flows.

However, the focus on the now, presentism, has been challenged, as plastic items have accumulated and turned up in environments such as oceans (Yang et al. 2015), snow in the Arctic (Bergmann et al. 2019), and human bodies (Bushnik et al. 2010). Previously used plastics thus give shape to non-utopias and present narratives of something out of control. Our desire to control and shape matter is being troubled, as is our wish to escape processes of decay.

This particular enactment of presentism is now, of course, collapsing. In the age of the Anthropocene plastic is making its lively and enduring presence felt. Its persistence and emergence in spaces and bodies everywhere is revealing a troubling new temporality: the deep time of our anthropocenic future. (Hawkins 2018, 100)

Thus, we can conclude that the combination of design and plastics has enacted futures. Plastics have performed contradictions and paradoxes over the relatively short time they have been around. They have been celebrated for their durability as well as their ephemerality. They have also been associated with malleability at the same time as their resistance to being influenced by their environment (Davis 2015). As disposable plastic products are now being questioned through proposed bans, taxation, and more, we find it relevant to focus on something as tiny as the plastic straw and how it has become a matter of concern.

The Plastic Straw: from a Preference to a Matter of Concern

Alongside many other disposable plastic products, the plastic drinking straw took off as a consumer item after the Second World War. Straws are usually used for a short time before being thrown away and left to break down slowly. As this rather short use time stands in stark contrast to the time it takes for material the plastic straw is made of to come into being and break down, the plastic drinking straw has lately become a matter of concern across sectors. The circulation of affective images of a bird with its stomach full of plastic waste and a turtle with a plastic drinking straw in its nose helped make plastic straws a public concern. In 2018, these concerns resulted in calls for bans or the drafting and adoption of actual bans.

Citizen- and association-led petitions have been launched against disposable plastic straws in specific locations and against specific actors, such as fast-food companies. Some companies followed suit and said that they would stop using single-use plastic straws. For example, Starbucks, as a global actor, attracted a lot of attention for its aim to stop using disposable plastic straws by 2020, but it postponed this goal to the end of 2021.

In Sweden, entrepreneurs have approached consumers’ concerns by, for example, reviving the practice of using plants, such as reeds,³ as drinking tubes. Others have made more enduring drinking straws, such as metal straws.

Citizens, civil society, and companies reacted; so have local and national governments, sometimes in collaboration. In Seattle, for example, the environmental conservation group Lonely Whale worked in 2017 with both restaurants and restaurant goers to stop using disposable plastics. In 2018, the city banned plastic straws in restaurants, unless needed for medical reasons. Taiwan held public hearings the same year, and, in 2019, a partial ban was put into place (Chia-Nan 2019).

As plastic litter often travels across borders, bans are also put in place on an international level. To reduce the amount of plastic waste and to promote fair competition within the EU, the European Council decided in 2019 (European Union 2019) that single-use plastic items such as plastic straws would be banned by 2021.The ban came into force in July 2021.

Overall, it seemed like most actors, including citizens, civil society, companies, and nations, agreed on banning the plastic straw. This move towards a universal ban on plastic straws has, however, also generated criticism and become a matter of concern of another kind. Some have argued for it being an ineffective action to ban specific products – only a symbolic move – because plastic straws make up only a fragment of the plastic waste generated each year. In other places, it was described and enacted as a tension and conflict between environmentalists and disability communities (see, for example, Hash 2018; Sharma 2019; Wong 2019). Many pointed out that bendable plastic straws are an essential means for drinking for some people. Some were alarmed by the stigmatizing that a universal ban would cause, as well as the re-medicalization of some lives, with a particular sensitivity to how bending plastic straws started to circulate in medical care.⁴ Smith (2018) wrote:

Let me be blunt: Screeching at us about straws is not going to fix the problem of plastic. For that, we need to go higher up the supply chain, rethinking when and how we produce plastics across the board instead of shaming disabled people who are piping up about our needs. And disabled people need to be included in the conversation about reducing plastic waste—our needs matter just as much as trees and sea turtles. (Smith 2018, para 14)

A universal ban on plastic straws would have a serious effect on how certain lives can be lived. Furthermore, Smith (2018) criticized the ban for targeting the wrong level when it aims at the product level. In addition, Liboiron (2016, 2021), who runs a feminist, anticolonial lab specializing in monitoring plastic pollution, emphasized that the matter of concern should be moved from the product level to the production level. They wrote that, regarding plastics, it is the roots of petrochemicals that should be addressed. This could be done by “thinking through upstream action to decrease or eliminate the production of pollutants” (Liboiron 2016, 102).

To better understand emerging concerns in the un/making of the plastic straw, we turned to research through design.

Un/Making the Plastic Straw through Design

When the plastic straw became a matter of concern, we were invited to exhibit in a group show with a focus on experiments and utopia in southern Sweden at the Ystad Art Museum. All the exhibiting artists and designers had their particular concerns and ways of going about their experiments. In our case, we were interested in bringing matters related to un/making the plastic straw into this context through design as a kind of experiment in un/making the plastic era as a utopia. More specifically, we exhibited a series of design artifacts.

In the exhibition (Figure 1), the artifacts were framed by four themes: temporality, caring relationships, microbiological co-living, and aftermath. The themes were presented through parts of our contextualizing research, including an image from a cultural heritage museum, excerpts from academic texts, illustrations and text from a patent archive, images from commercials, and more. The materials were put on a cork noticeboard and presented in a way that would suggest ongoing work in a design studio. To further frame these fragmented materials, we wrote four texts that introduced the themes, all of which ended with a series of questions. The materials put on the noticeboard did not, in that sense, provide a complete and final analysis of how to read or understand these proposals, but helped in framing the artifacts as questions addressing different aspects of disposability.

Figure 1 Un/Making the Plastic Straw, exhibited at Utopian Experiments in 2018 at the Ystad Art Museum. Photo: Kristina Lindström.

In the following section, we introduce the four themes through the exhibited design and parts of the contextualizing materials in the exhibition.

Temporality

Disposable products are often meant only for one-time use. The short use time of disposable plastic straws, however, stands in stark contrast to the temporality before and after use. It takes millions of years for fossil fuels, which are one common source for making plastic straws, to come into being. And because most plastics do not decompose, a plastic straw can last in landfills or in the ocean for hundreds of years.

The text that introduced the theme of temporality in the exhibition ended with a question on how to design straws so that their lifespan is better adjusted to their use time. In response to this question, we made two proposals.

One of the design proposals was a straw that would dissolve during use time and thereby blend into and become part of the drink itself. We explored different materials and ended up with a straw made of ice or frozen cordial. Because of its extreme ephemeral character, it was presented in the exhibition as a strip of images showing the process of melting (Figure 2).

Figure 2 Straw made of frozen cordial that melts during use time, 2018. Photo: Kristina Lindström.

The other proposal was an attempt to revive plant-based drinking straws, which were first replaced by paper straws and later plastic straws. As shown in a patent on paper straws from 1888 that we displayed on the noticeboard, the artificial straws were deemed preferable because of their durability but were still required to look like natural straws (for example, those made from rye grass). To situate a revival of plant-based drinking straws in the local flora of southern Sweden, we used Sweet Cicely. This particular plant was suggested to us during a conversation with Lobell (n.d.), who also showed her work at the exhibition. She had used Sweet Cicely to create a straw that offers an aftertaste of licorice. We presented this proposal in the shape of seed bags with an illustration showing both the plant and the potential to use the stem as a drinking straw (Figure 3a). We also planted a series of plants that we had dug up from a field in the vicinity (Figure 3b).

Figure 3 (A) Illustration by Malin Lobell of drinking straw made from Sweet Cicely on seed bag, 2018. (B) Foraged Sweet Cicely. The stem can be used as a drinking straw, 2018. Photo: Kristina Lindström.

Although both of our designs are disposable, they address some of the challenges of presentism (Hawkins 2018) that disposable plastic products have created. By using materials that do not resist decomposition and decay, the designs suggest how to better adjust lifespan to use time. The drinking straw made of ice is perhaps the most extreme, as it most likely will melt even before one manages to finish the drink. A central difference between the proposals, however, lies in the way they are presented. The snapshots of the melting ice straw tell the visitors little about how it came into being. By presenting the straw made from Sweet Cicely in the making rather than as a final product, we highlighted the time that goes into growing a plant-based straw, which is a factor that is often obscured in disposable products.

Caring Relationships

A central argument for using disposable plastic straws is that they require less work and care. The cost of hiring a dishwasher, installing a sink, and replacing broken glasses was, for example, one of the reasons for switching to disposable cups and straws made from paper at soda fountains in the USA during the early twentieth century (Funderburg 2002).

The thematic text on caring relationships in the exhibition ended with questions concerning the implications of a revival of more durable and reusable products. Visitors to the exhibition could read the questions on the noticeboard: “How does this potential shift affect the supposed care-free living that disposable products have enabled? What practices and artifacts become important?”

In response to these questions, we designed a drinking straw necklace together with Lilja (n.d.). It comprises a glass straw with a small dishwashing brush stuck into it (Figure 4). By wearing the necklace, one would always have access to a straw, but one would also have to clean it after use. Because it is made of glass, it is fragile and must be worn with a certain care.

Figure 4 Drinking straw necklace. Made in collaboration with Petra Lilja, 2018. Photo: Kristina Lindström.

There are obviously many ways of reviving reusable drinking straws; depending on how this is done, caring relations and work will be distributed differently. In this case, the main work was put on the user, who would have to be sure to wear the necklace rather than expecting a straw to be provided anywhere and anytime. The work of cleaning the glass necklace straw once it is used is also put on the user.

For the un/making of disposability, different kinds of caring practices are needed. Mundane practices of doing the dishes and remembering to put the necklace on extend beyond the short use time of a straw. The work and care required to use and maintain the straw necklace do, in that sense, trouble the specific presentism (Hawkins 2018) that is enacted through disposable plastic straws. Failing to bring one’s own straw does, however, have very different implications for different people: compare somebody who wants it just to make a moment more festive with somebody who otherwise has great difficulty drinking.

Microbiological Co-Living

One of the arguments for using disposable straws, for example straws made out of rye stalks and paper, at soda fountains in the USA during the early twentieth century was to prevent the spread of diseases such as tuberculosis and polio (Funderburg 2002). At the turn of the century, it was common practice to use public drinking cups chained to water faucets. When it became known that these shared drinking vessels helped to spread germs, they were abolished. Since then, disposable cups and straws have been associated with hygiene. For example, Douglas Woodring from the Ocean Recovery Alliance said that he noticed an increase in the use of plastic after the outbreak of SARS in 2003 (Parker 2018).

In parallel with this development, it has gradually become highly debated whether this separation of entities has gone too far. A growing body of work argues that microscopic organisms, such as bacteria, fungi, and viruses, are central to our health. Some also argue that an industrialized society, with an increase in sanitation combined with several other factors, such as diet, has unintentionally harmed our good microbes.⁵

As a rather open-ended question, we asked visitors to the exhibition to consider how more communal drinking practices might affect our microbiological co-living.

In response to this question, we designed a shared drinking vessel that was inspired by a depiction in clay from Mesopotamia that is dated c. 2600–2350 BCE (MET n.d.). The depiction shows people drinking from a communal vessel with straws that had a filtering function: to avoid drinking the by-product of the fermentation process of the beer. In our version, we designed six long metal straws at two different heights together with Petra Lilja (Figure 5). The straws run through a lid into a large transparent glass vessel. The vessel and straws are accompanied by a large dishwashing brush for cleaning. The vessel was placed on a table in the exhibition space, and during the opening of the show, it was filled with beer.

Figure 5 A communal drinking vessel made together with Petra Lilja. Un/Making the Plastic Straw, Ystad Art Museum, 2018. Photo: Kristina Lindström.

At the time and place of making this design proposal, it seemed rather innocent to disrupt the idea of separation being preferable and to invite other configurations of microbiological co-living. However, we wrote this paper in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic, when separation and hygiene became one of the main arguments for postponing bans of plastic disposable products (see, for example, an open letter written by European Plastics Converter (2020)). Although there are many other ways of keeping distance and preventing the spread of the virus, debates sparked by the pandemic show how the un/making of plastic single-use items enacts multiple and conflicting matters of concern.

Aftermath

Most of our proposals offered alternatives to the plastic straw through different kinds of revival put to work in the present time. In the final theme, we wanted to draw attention to the aftermath of plastic disposable products, which disrupts imaginaries of human control previously associated with plastics. Because plastic straws are often used for drinks on the go, they do not always make it into the recycling system. Additionally, not all recycling systems can handle small plastic items, such as plastic straws. Plastic straws can thus be found in public urban and rural areas, as well as in waterways and oceans, where they most likely will linger for a long time to come, even if there is a ban (Figure 6).

Figure 6 Observing disposable plastic straws that linger, 2018. Photo: Åsa Ståhl.

In response to the longevity of plastics, we asked ourselves and the exhibition visitors: “how can we collectively care for the aftermath?”

To engage with this question, we aligned with a distributed emerging practice in Sweden that has been named plogging (UN Environment Program 2018). Plogging entails picking up plastic litter, often disposable, single-use items, while jogging. Towards the end of the exhibition, we organized a version of plogging, but at a slower pace. This was done in collaboration with Sara Gottschalk and Petra Lilja.

We walked for about an hour from the museum to the train station in the harbor (Figure 7), through a picturesque residential area. Afterwards, we all poured out our findings on a sheet outside the museum (Figure 8). These findings included unidentifiable pieces of plastics, fishing nets, plastics straws, and several other disposable products. Notably, we did not find any PET bottles. As one participant pointed out, this might be because they are actually not disposed of but reused or recycled within a Swedish deposit system.

Figure 7 Plogging event in Ystad, Sweden, 2018. Photo: Åsa Ståhl.

Figure 8 Sifting through findings from the plogging event, 2018. Photo: Åsa Ståhl.

When we parted ways, the question remained: who will take care of the aftermath of the plastic era, and how? In this particular case, who should do what with the plastic findings collected during the plogging event? Due to the durability of plastics, societies will have to deal with the aftermath and those questions for a long time to come.

Un/Making Disposability Differently

Un/making the plastic straw through research through design is aligned with, but also differs from, other ongoing societal and cultural ways of unmaking this particular single-use plastic item.

The designed artifacts are outcomes of an iterative process of asking what was preferable and reviving those in the present. Overall, the artifacts can be thought to un/make plastic disposable items. Furthermore, the exhibited artifacts also participate in un/making practices and imaginaries of preferred futures that disposable plastic items have been part of enabling, not through proposing something completely new but through different forms of revival in combination with already emerging ways of un/making disposability, or, more particularly, disposable plastic straws. The different proposals did, however, un/make disposability in different ways. Thereby, they also un/make different aspects of disposability and what disposability has previously participated in making as well as unmaking. Taken together, the artifacts did not propose or project one future as preferable to another.

As we have shown through our design proposals and articulation of themes, matters at stake in the un/making of the plastic straw do not only concern the environment. Un/making the plastic straw also evokes a range of overlapping and conflicting concerns, such as how to distribute care and responsibility and how to manage hygiene. Through the articulation of themes, we suggest what each design proposal intervenes in: temporality, caring relationships, microbiological co-living, and aftermath. In this sense, each design proposal can be understood as answering the questions posed at the end of each thematic text in the exhibition. At the same time, each design proposal can be seen as a new designerly what if question. The design proposals thus become a kind of makeshift answer while simultaneously opening up new questions regarding dilemmas, frictions, and differences that these particular artifacts are part of enacting.

It is thereby important to not consider the four themes a complete map of matters at stake in the un/making of the plastic straw. The themes and artifacts try to offer a selection of situated responses that hopefully make differences explicit (Mazé 2019) and that invite further inquiries into the implications of un/making disposability. In hindsight, we can, for example, see that we missed explicitly including certain positions, situations, and perspectives: we wish that we had given more form to and included situations in which the plastic straw is still important and valid. We do not have to look far to see how crucial the straw can be in sustaining life, because both of us have experience with aging family members becoming dependent on straws. We can also notice the absence of a more explicit refusal to use straws, which is inherently difficult to give form to.

As we write this paper, the un/making of plastic straws and other disposable products is still ongoing, continuously negotiated, with parts coming into effect and at the same time questioned because of the current pandemic (COVID-19). In an entangled way, conflicting ideas of the preferable continues to appear as matters of concern that generate conflicts of interest. As we move towards a conclusion, it is therefore important to remember that the un/making of the plastic straw is not over and done with; it is something to continue to live with.

Conclusion

In response to urgent environmental issues that have emerged in the aftermath of design, this article has explored and proposed a turn towards un/making, which invites a kind of sensitivity and attentiveness to the inherent simultaneous creative and destructive aspects of design. In line with an emerging body of work across disciplines (Shove 2012; Coombs, McNamara, and Sade 2019; Tonkinwise 2019; Feola 2019), we propose a turn away from designers’ inclination to focus solely on making the new.

Whereas most work within this area of research tends to be theoretical and conceptual, our inquiry into un/making puts focus on the implication and potentialities of bringing these calls into (speculative) design practice. More specifically, the proposal to un/make has been explored through a designerly inquiry into the already ongoing un/making of the plastic straw.

Un/making tries to hold space for both making and unmaking as lively and interdependent practices. For designers it is important to understand these dynamics as, for example, single-use plastic items are now emerging as un-preferable and designers are consequently faced with calls to ban and demands of getting rid of what has previously been preferable. In the wake of a subtraction, space is potentially made for wise and careful making. The slash in un/making is there as a reminder of the double movement of making and unmaking as well as frictions arising through these movements.

One implication of this reorientation towards un/making is that the design process becomes less driven by speculative what if questions related to new and emerging technologies to also include speculative what was questions. For example, in our work, speculative alternatives to the plastic drinking straw have often taken the shape of a revival of that which has previously been deemed un-preferable. To understand the implications and potential frictions of reviving past alternatives to the plastic straw, we argue for the importance of conducting research into the history of the drinking straw. How did a design come into being in the first place? What did it replace? What made it preferable, for whom, and why?

Through a combination of this research into the history of the drinking straw and crafting speculative design proposals to be enacted in the present, we have been able to articulate four themes that make some of the matters at stake in the un/making of the plastic straw and disposability explicit: temporality, caring relationships, microbiological co-living, and aftermath. Whereas bans primarily put focus on the removal of things, we argue that it is important to pay attention to making that can occur when something is subtracted. Designers can approach this opening with what if questions and answer them with material suggestions. In other words, subtraction, such as removals through bans, can make space (Feola 2019) for designers to make things that make other opportunities visible.

Finally, we would like to bring attention to the limits of design. As pointed out earlier, not all kinds of problems are fit to be addressed through design. It must, for example, be acknowledged that the practices and experiments we give account of are not on the same scale as the challenges the world is facing. Whereas no one approach can improve everything, our insights into unmaking prompted us to start with what we have at hand and where we are situated, while at the same time building on others’ moves. We therefore conclude that although design can do important work, it is not sufficient to address the issue of un/making the plastic straw through design. To un/make the plastic straw as well as disposability, there is, as Hawkins (2019) articulated, a need for new economical arrangements that disrupt certain forms of disposability. Ahead of us, therefore, we see a deepened engagement with diverse economies in relation to design (see, for example, Gibson-Graham 2008; Roelvink 2016; DiSalvo 2019).

Acknowledgements

We wish to thank Lara Houston for inspiring us to work with the plastic drinking straw. We are very thankful for Gunnel Pettersson’s invitation to develop and show our work in her exhibition. Thank you for the generative curation and for creating such a collaborative platform!

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This artistic research has been financed by the Swedish Research Council, grant 2017-02198.

Notes on contributors

Kristina Lindström

Dr Kristina Lindström is a Senior Lecturer in Design at the School of Arts and Communication at Malmö University. Her research draws on speculative, participatory, and inventive methods with a focus on designerly public engagement and future-making. Together with Åsa Ståhl, she runs the Un/Making Studio, which explores alternatives to progressivist and anthropocentric ways of doing and thinking with design. Lindström also heads the research project Hope and Grief in Transition and co-organizes the research platform Collaborative Future-Making at Malmö University. [email protected]

Åsa Ståhl

Åsa Ståhl (Ph.D.) is a design researcher and a senior lecturer at the Department of Design at Linnaeus University. Her work combines participatory design with feminist technoscience and environmental posthumanities in explorations and speculations of how to make and know liveable worlds. Together with Kristina Lindström, she runs the Un/Making Studio, which is built on two decades of collaborations between the two of them and others. Ståhl heads the research project Holding Surplus House and the research environment Design after Progress: reimagining design histories and futures. [email protected]

Notes

1 This work is part of a larger project on un/making financed by the Swedish Research Council, grant 2017-02198. We have also started the Un/Making Studio. See more: http://www.unmakingstudio.se.

2 The exhibition was curated by Gunnel Pettersson and open during the summer of 2018 (documentation of exhibition: http://experimentutopier.org). Visitors at the exhibition were informed about the project being part of the Un/Making Matters research project through text in the exhibition space and on the exhibition website, as well as in direct discussions with us. During an event on the aftermath that involved more active participation, we took extra care to communicate that the event formed part of a research project. Informed consent was obtained verbally.

3 For example, prisoners in Sweden have been part of the production using both reed and straw (Kriminalvården 2019a, 2019b).

4 This can, for example, be seen in early advertising for flex-straws (Broda-Bahm 2002).

5 For an overview of these debates, see, for example, Eisenstein (2020).