Repurposing Bits and Pieces of the Digital Vygandas “Vegas” Šimbelis, Pedro Ferreira, Elsa Vaara1, Jarmo Laaksolahti1, Kristina Höök Mobile Life @ Royal Institute of Technology 1Mobile Life @ SICS 10044 Stockholm, Sweden 16429 Kista, Sweden vygandas, pedropaf,
[email protected] elsa,
[email protected] ABSTRACT Repurposing refers to a broad set of practices, such as recy- cling or upcycling, all aiming to make better use of or give new life to physical materials and artefacts. While these practices have an obvious interest regarding sustainability issues, they also bring about unique aesthetics and values that may inspire design beyond sustainability concerns. What if we can harness these qualities in digital materials? We introduce Delete by Haiku, an application that trans- forms old mobile text messages into haiku poems. We elab- orate on how the principles of repurposing – working on a low budget, introducing chance and combining the original values with the new ones – can inform interaction design in evoking some of these aesthetic values. This approach changes our views on what constitutes “digital materials” and the opportunities they offer. We also connect recent debates concerning ownership of data with discussions in the arts on the “Death of the Author.” Figure 1. The haiku project: a) SMS thread with themes folder (right). b) The “haiku-bin” with generated haiku. AUTHOR KEYWORDS Repurposing; Reuse; Recycling; Upcycling Design; Digital strategies mainly focus on sustainability research, they have Upcycling; Aesthetics of Deletion; Interaction Design; In- also resulted in particular aesthetic expressions, which have teractive Art become interesting and appealing in themselves, beyond the ACM CLASSIFICATION KEYWORDS demands of a strict sustainability perspective.