“Our relationship with nature is broken. But relationships can change. When we protect nature - we are nature protecting itself.” (@GretaThunberg, May 22, 2021).

“So we have to be careful what we humans design, because we are literally designing the future, and that future isn’t in our idea of the thing, how we think it will be used and so on—that’s just our access mode. The future emerges directly from the objects we design”. – Timothy Morton

“In essence: technics is memory-support. And this means technics is the condition of the constitution of the relation to the past.” – Bernard Stiegler

Hiperproductivity seems to be a feature of our contemporary lives. Not only in the sense of the production of objects, necessary gadgets, or useless junk, but also in terms of virtual and digital matters.

Vast surfaces are colonized by the effects of these matters, vestiges of a civilization in progress, in process, in development, crisis and decay. We are witnessing the complexity of the sense of residue when an accumulative sedimentation takes place globally. The phenomenon of the “plastic soup” is just an example of it.

Many countries, companies, industries, and individuals have understood and increased their investments worldwide in reducing carbon-emissions. It is evident the intention in some developed countries, at least, on mitigating in part their carbon footprints. Lately we have been witnessing the complex debate on regulating biomass burnings. Energy, use of soil, water, and climate are more than ever the main aspects for thinking design in the middle of a deep changing environment.

Residues, remnants, and vestiges are all over the place, they inhabit the space, the void, the territories, surfaces, and undergrounds, but they also inhabit the virtual, the digital, communications, expressions, memories, emotions, and imaginaries.

Australian philosopher Patrick Stokes, in his article “The decay of digital personhood. Towards new norms of disposal and preservation”, published in the edited book Residues of Death: Disposal Refigured (Eds. Kohn, Gibbs, Nansen, van Ryn, 2019) writes about the “moral implications of the persistence of digital residues”. He argues that we are living in a world where the remains of someone else can continue living digitally in a “network of relationships and association.” He writes that “such digital residues should be considered as “digital remains” analogous to bodily remains.”

What kind of implications that sort of statement has towards design, both industrial and experimental? How should we understand the scope of an issue that seems to be invisible to the daily activities in industrialized societies when it is also creating a massive complex environmental transformation? What are the potential tools that design, art and other aesthetic and cultural practices, and in that sense designers, artists, activists, cultural agents, should develop, both conceptually and materially, to think this challenging residual matter?

Design, as a multidisciplinary field, faces an increasing challenge when confronting its role in the production of leftovers, residues, remnants, and vestiges. Both industrialization and manufacturing in design industry implies a hyper productivity that collides with the limitations of our world. How design is, or should be, engaging with these matters, from its different surfaces of practice and research? In what way design researchers are developing, or should develop, critical approaches to a sensible, social, political, and economic agency that is touching different aspects of our in-development societies? How design as a practice and research through practice should compose the spaces for allowing a conscious response to a multiple and sometimes confusing and complex socio-political, and business environment? What sort of tools are research designers exploring and developing both conceptually and materially to confront and participate in these broader discussions? How can we start thinking about and pushing forward post-sustainable design practices?

This issue of Immaterial aims to gather scholarly articles from a broad perspective highlighting the material and immaterial agency of the phenomena of the residual. With an interest in gathering research from different places around the world, effectively exposing the different approaches to similar problems, and allowing the scientific review to be the space of encounter for diverse researchers. We would like to invite designers, thinkers, theoreticians, philosophers, artists, activists, social engineers, mediators, educators, to share their ideas, approximations, practices, and methodologies to contribute an intense and multilayered aspect of our present.