Siv Årsand
The paper investigates how a Materials Library of Stones can be designed to foreground relations among digital technologies, people, land, and minerals. Digital devices are typically understood through interfaces and services, while the stones and minerals that make them possible remain obscured and are often extracted under violent and unequal conditions. In response, the paper presents the ongoing development of a Materials Library of Stones at the Department of Informatics, University of Oslo, conceived as a systemic design artefact that re-materialises digital infrastructures and their entanglements with extraction geographies and more-than-human worlds.
The research asks: How can designs of a Materials Library of Stones foreground relations between digital technologies, people, land, and minerals? The question is explored through four design workshops in which participants worked with stones, minerals, clay, and dismantled mobile phones. Two workshops foregrounded storytelling and nomadic library forms; two focused on technofossils, slowness, and time. Analysis of field notes, artefacts, and discussions identified four themes: technofossils, waste, and futures; slowness and the politics of digital consumption; stories, mappings, and material journeys; and listening and sound.
These themes are read through Povinelli’s geontologies, Indigenous and Sámi cartographies, and Sámi concepts of nomadic libraries, listening (gulahallat), and dwelling. On this basis, the paper formulates a design approach, Designing for Geontologies, and develops the concept Stones, Stories, and Geontologies as a guiding frame for the Materials Library of Stones. The approach is articulated through a set of spatial configurations (heart space, relational surfaces, technofossil stations, listening nodes), participatory practices (addressing stones, tracing relations, storytelling, collective listening), and four design principles: designing for multiple temporalities, slowness and shared responsibility, participatory geontological mappings and stories, and collective listening. The paper contributes an empirically grounded exploration of digital–material interaction, a design approach informed by geontology, and a transferable concept for systemic and pluralistic materials libraries.
Keywords: systemic design; materials libraries; geontologies, ontological design, indigenous cartographies