Alessio Caccamo and Claudia Rio
Contemporary societies exhibit a constitutive paradox: infrastructures of memory, digital archives, cloud storage, institutional preservation systems, promise unlimited conservation while simultaneously generating systematic and selective processes of abandonment. This paper examines this structural contradiction through an analytical instrument seldom applied in this context: the concept of mould as an involuntary filter of collective disinterest. Within regimes of algorithmic selection, institutional canons, and cultural hierarchies that collectively produce forms of forgetting masked by declared criteria, fungal colonisation serves as a biological indicator, revealing where a society has materially withdrawn attention, maintenance, and resources. The argument unfolds through a research-through-design trajectory culminating in Residua, a critical and experimental editorial artefact developed within the framework of critical and speculative design (Dunne & Raby, 2013). Conceived as an ephemeral editorial organism, Residua is a publication deliberately designed to decompose through controlled fungal colonisation of its material support. The object has not been damaged; it has been transformed, becoming a living archive that performs its own theory. Decay is not failure, it is method. Residue is not inert waste, it is an active archive. The paper contributes to systemic design pluralism by proposing an anti-curation: a systemic reading of collective disinterest that relies not on declared hierarchies but on the material evidence of what ceases to be maintained. By embracing decomposition as epistemological honesty, the project challenges the prevailing temporality of design, one inextricably linked to industrial capitalism, carrying both the promise of permanence and the logic of programmed obsolescence.
Keywords: research through design, critical design, planned obsolescence, post-anthropocentric design, ephemeral artefacts.