Gazodexing: Methods for Design Practice in the Territory of Waste
Creators: name: Pisano, Giorgia
Publisher: name: RMIT University
Year: 2024
Subjects: classificationCode: 330314
subject: Sustainable design
classificationCode: 330309
subject: Industrial and product design

description: This research investigates pluralistic notions of waste, its effects, and implications for design practice and for the operationalisation of (un)sustainability. Waste as a site of complexity reveals critical entanglements that are inextricable from the political economy, socio-material agencies, and the technical and cultural milieu which Design is part producer of and reproduced by. Designing in relation to waste is a contested territory, one that is frequently addressed through technical solutionism, critique and speculation, whether utopian or dystopian. Resisting the urge to excise complexity, this practice-led research brings design into the messiness of waste to envision new tools and modes for working through it while also reassessing my relationship to practice.
Against this onto-ethical backdrop is a creative practice concerned with ways of building a particular capacity for responding – response-ability – through design, playfulness, and metaphorical metamorphoses. Taking a heutagogical approach, the exploration with waste reveals ‘intrinsic’ qualities from which to enlarge concerns of practice through literature-oriented and exploratory modes of (self-)inquiry, studio-based material experimentation, theorising through craft, writing and diagrammatic models. This practice builds on the empirical and abstract elements, design processes and methodological patterns uncovered through a series of projects.
Emerging from this research is a model of, and for, practice – what I call Gazodexing. Inspired by waste’s fascinating ability to traverse boundaries, this model forms as a research and practice methodology. Drawing from a gaze developed through a personal creaturely metamorphosis into an eight-legged mite – Demodex folliculorum – Gazodexing arises from piecing together the outcomes and insights that the research yielded. This model is a ludic speculation that requires extraneous inputs, constrictions, and roleplaying to induce a personal response that accounts for the ‘impersonal’ – an aptitude for response-ability toward the other centres beyond ours. It invites a mindset of nourishing and moving through the questions rather than advancing answers or solutions, least of all a normative and universalised set of practices to deal with waste – an/other to ‘ecological design practice’. 
This research contributes methodological knowledge to two fields. To the broader field of Waste Studies, it presents an instantiation of how a designer may approach, understand, and contemplate the multifaceted topic of waste. To creative practice and design research, it offers a methodological example of how to induce, and experience, a different gaze in order to contend with complex systems such as waste. These methods coalesce in Gazodexing and form as a way of challenging, re-learning, and transfiguring practice. Presenting new ways of ‘doing practice’ to attend to intractable problems, this research recasts it as a ‘practice of doing’, of attentively tuning in and responding to a situation in flux.