“As the life of inhabitants overflows into gardens and streets, fields and forests, so the world pours into the building, giving rise to characteristic echoes of reverberation and patterns of light and shade. It is in these flows and counter-flows, winding through or amidst without beginning or end, and not as connected entities bounded either from within or without, that things are instantiated in the world.” (Ingold 2010 p.11)
Why do we put so much emphasis on ‘flow’ in performing research into residual materials? First of all, the notion of circularity describes a type of movement. Whether we are talking about loops or about circularity, the defining characteristic is an idea of flow (how things circulate). Linear economy, as opposed to circular economy, is often described along the lines of a linear flow (take, make, waste). Circularity, more than anything else, puts forward the idea of a ubiquitous and continual flow. What this means is that ‘waste’ does not exist in the same way as it does in linear economy thinking.
Whatever is labeled as residual, waste, or redundant is no longer something that we can ‘make disappear’ or regard as harmless, let alone powerless. How residual material flows come into being, how they get enacted and what they help enact in turn should be of main concern in understanding the possibilities and consequences of a transition towards circularity. The unwanted, negative (and sometimes unforeseen) effects of a linear economy, whether thinking of human impact on ecosystems, or the impact on social systems, communities and societies, can be seen as a result of a lack of insight and understanding of ‘flow’ and relations among things. When we start to think more along the lines of flow and entanglement, we not only become aware of these concerns and can begin to address them, but we start to see new possibilities for action.
Materials flow through the city. This flowing is in part an entangling, they get mixed up with the world. In this entangling the concrete pavement stones in the streets, the benches in the parks and the trees alongside the canals get enacted as for instance, a transportation surface, as vista points and as dog-urinal. In their entanglement with a myriad of materials, animals, people, and practices we apprehend these materials as in various situations. Thinking of materials as in a situation of circulation or flow is one of such ways to apprehend them, thinking of them as in a maintenance situation or specific use-situation such as sitting is another. With each situation we find a material in, with each way of framing the material in relation to a specific context, various actants come to the fore. Circularity can only be understood through this idea of entanglement or a vast meshwork of things together moving through time and space, ever changing, in flow. Circularity is not described by a model of several closed loops or circles. Circularity emphasizes the fact that things circulate, entangle and leak. They can (and will) loop into eachothers trajectories. Observing residual materials as being in various situations, imagining them to be in others and intervening in those situations exposes or makes visible such entanglements and brings new possibilities into view.
Designers, as makers and creative professionals dealing with bringing things into the world, are capable of generating highly valuable knowledge on these entanglements and can translate these possibilities into potential futures. When designers engage in the reflective practice we call Designerly Research (or Ontwerpend Onderzoek) they observe, analyze, and reflect by making, proposing, mapping, categorizing, naming, storytelling, combining, and de-contextualizing and re-contextualizing. How these actions together form the notion of RE-framing and how designers investigate by having a reflective conversation with the materials of the situation is something we have discussed elsewhere (The Materials of the Situation, Framing Design Approaches, Close Encounters with the Possible). What is important to note regarding the concept of ‘flow’ and circularity is the creative and innovative capacities of the designer to engage reflectively and productively with materials and how and what they are in the world, in particular, in specific situations.
“To think of the kite as an object is to omit the wind – to forget that it is, in the first place, a kite-in-the-air.” (Ingold 2010 p.7)
“…material things, like people, are processes, and that their real agency lies precisely in the fact that ‘they cannot always be captured and contained’ (Pollard 2004: 60). As we have found, it is in the opposite of capture and containment, namely discharge and leakage, that we discover the life of things. Bearing this in mind, we can return to Deleuze and Guattari, who insist that whenever we encounter matter, ‘it is matter in movement, in flux, in variation’. And the consequence, they go on to assert, is that ‘this matter-flow can only be followed’ (Deleuze and Guattari 2004: 451). What Deleuze and Guattari here call a ‘matter-flow’, I would call a material. Accordingly, I recast the assertion as a simple rule of thumb: to follow the materials.” (Ingold 2010 p.8)