Towards eco-social contracts through an entangled manifestation of digital litter
Özçetin, S., Fernaeus, Y., Özçetin, Ş., and Pschetz, L. (2025). Towards eco-social contracts through an entangled manifestation of digital litter, in Morrison, A., Culén, A. & Habib, L. (eds.), Nordes 2025: Relational Design, 6-8 August, Oslo, Norway. https://doi.org/10.21606/nordes.2025.65
*** Open Access ***
Many of the current debates in technology concern the extractive practices around planetary resources and data, which produce electronic waste as well as everyday sense of clutter among media channels and files. In this paper, we engage with this problem space through a specific focus on Terms of Service agreements, which have become a prerequisite for even the most rudimentary use of technology. We do this by presenting an exploded view of an existing Terms of Service policy ecosystem, in the form of an outdoor installation, temporarily littering a patch of nature. Through this installation, we expose eco-social contracts as a design opening for more-than-human data governance, ecological temporalities, and the right to patchwork as generative concepts.
This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No 955990.