What comes to count as sustainable in Rosendal? : a study of how sustainability is being reproduced in an urban sociomaterial assemblage

Urban districts around the world are increasingly developed to be sustainable. In this thesis Iexplore what comes to count as sustainable in Rosendal, a developing urban district inUppsala, Sweden. I view Rosendal as an example of contemporary urban sustainability. Inlight of how urban sustainability initiatives tend to reproduce the status quo, my aim is toquestion taken-for-granted meanings of sustainability and open up for alternativeperspectives. I explore which everyday practices residents of Rosendal associate withsustainability, by drawing upon practice-theoretical approaches. Additionally, I analyse theSustainability in Rosendal discourse by focusing on the perspectives of Uppsala Municipalityand property developers. I approach Rosendal as an urban sociomaterial assemblage,constantly in the process of being made. This perspective helps account for the variouspractices, discourses and ‘more-than-humans’ shaping what comes to count as sustainable,while decentring humans and bringing forth human interdependency with ‘the environment’.Additionally, the emergent character of assemblages points towards the possibility for urbanenvironments to be developed differently. My findings show that prevailing sustainabilitymeanings reproduced within practices and discourses, do not initiate the type oftransformation often called for. Much of what currently comes to count as sustainable inRosendal is underpinned by a neoliberal growth logic where attractive districts are developedfor the chosen few. I show how more-than-human actants, including allotments, cars andwooden panels, contribute to what comes to count as sustainable in Rosendal. By payingattention to the effects of these actants, I envision alternative trajectories for the urbanassemblages making up Rosendal. Finally, I suggest that integrating feminist care ethics intourban development can foster more just and transformative sustainabilities

Salvage rites: making memory on a Montana homestead

The preservation of selected sites and artefacts privileges certain forms of cultural memory. Other material cultures, no longer useful and deemed unworthy of preservation, accumulate in overlooked places. Abandoned in a state of unfinished disposal, these objects and structures can generate unpredictable and unruly effects. Such degraded materialities may trigger apprehensions of cultural memory in a mode unfamiliar to the museum or the heritage park. This study takes up the residual material culture of a homestead in Western Montana to explore how history and memory are made, and remade, through interactions between people and things. Theories of performativity and intersubjectivity inform a move away from a broadly representational or semiotic understanding of material culture. In this study, experimental methodologies access the different ways in which material engagements animate the potential effects of a given artefact. One approach explores the potential for inclusive, artful inventory practice. Another engages in a process of associative storytelling which assembles disparate objects in constellations of meaning. A third approach observes the way in which sensory or haptic memory arises out of embodied action and practical reclamation. Finally, the thesis considers the nature of cultural memory and the processes of decay that obscure certain residues of knowledge even as they expose others. In conclusion, the thesis considers the social and political implications of such non-essentialist encounters with memory and materiality. The thesis argues that these active, creative encounters with objects open up the possibility for an ethical relation to the past-a salvage both of cultural artefacts and of overlooked histories

Design and Instantiation of an Interactive Multidimensional Ontology for Game Design Elements – a Design and Behavioral Approach

While games and play are commonly perceived as leisure tools, focus on the strategic implementation of isolated gameful elements outside of games has risen in recent years under the term gamification. Given their ease of implementation and impact in competitive games, a small set of game design elements, namely points, badges, and leaderboards, initially dominated research and practice. However, these elements reflect only a small group of components that game designers use to achieve positive outcomes in their systems. Current research has shifted towards focusing on the game design process instead of the isolated implementation of single elements under the term gameful design. But the problem of a tendency toward a monocultural selection of prominent design elements persists in-game and gameful design, preventing the method from reaching its full potential. This dissertation addresses this problem by designing and developing a digital, interactive game design element ontology that scholars and practitioners can use to make more informed and inspired decisions in creating gameful solutions to their problems. The first part of this work is concerned with the collation and development of the digital ontology. First, two datasets were collated from game design and gamification literature (game design elements and playing motivations). Next, four explorative studies were conducted to add user-relevant metadata and connect their items into an ontological structure. The first two studies use card sorting to assess game theory frameworks regarding their suitability as foundational categories for the game design element dataset and to gain an overview of different viewpoints from which categorizations can be derived. The second set of studies builds on an explorative method of matching dataset entries via their descriptive keywords to arrive at a connected graph. The first of these studies connects items of the playing motivations dataset with themselves, while the second connects them with an additional dataset of human needs. The first part closes with the documentation of the design and development of the tool Kubun, reporting on the outcome of its evaluation via iterative expert interviews and a field study. The results suggest that the tool serves its preset goals of affording intuitive browsing for dedicated searches and serendipitous findings. While the first part of this work reports on the top-down development process of the ontology and related navigation tool, the second part presents an in-depth research of specific learning-oriented game design elements to complement the overall research goal through a complementary bottom-up approach. Therein, two studies on learning-oriented game design elements are reported regarding their effect on performance, long-term learning outcome, and knowledge transfer. The studies are conducted with a game dedicated to teaching correct waste sorting. The first study focuses on a reward-based game design element in terms of its motivatory effect on perfect play. The second study evaluates two learning-enhancing game design elements, repeat, and look-up, in terms of their contribution to a long-term learning outcome. The comprehensive insights gained through the in-depth research manifest in the design of a module dedicated to reporting research outcomes in the ontology. The dissertation concludes with a discussion on the studies’ varying limitations and an outlook on pathways for future research

Continuing a Debate

This supplement contains Mario Blaser's response to the concepts of Political Ontology and Practical Ontology as discussed by Casper Bruun Jensen in his paper »Practical Ontologies Redux«. This article appeared in 2021 Berliner Blätter (issue 84), edited by Michaela Meurer and Kathrin Eitel. It also provides a response by Jensen to Blaser's critique.Not Reviewe

Through the threaded needle : A multi-sited ethnography on the sociomateriality of garment mending practices

Commonly associated with times of hardship and austerity, garment mending has come a long way from being a domesticated practice of need to an act of commodity activism. As a backlash to the ‘throw away’ culture of fast fashion, recent years have witnessed the emergence of various public garment mending events in Western countries. Although academic interest in mending has been growing among fashion researchers, their focus has remained limited to an exploration of perspectives on mending in domestic spaces. Through this dissertation a shift is made towards an examination of processes undertaken to mend by studying existing off-the-grid mending practices that run parallel to mainstream fast-fashion systems in self-organized communal repair events in four cities. How the practice of mending comes to matter is comprehensively investigated through this dissertation. This study primarily intends to understand, observe and illustrate an alternative conceptualization, by proposing to examine mending as a sociomaterial practice. Through identifying humans and non-human or social and material forces as intimately interlaced, this study anchors itself in a pragmatic philosophical paradigm. Building on this, scholarly works that forms part of the umbrella term ‘Practice Theories’ are used to develop a non-cognitive driven understanding of the practice of mending in a clothing use context. The work draws on three years of in-depth, multi-sited ethnographic field research in 18 communal garment mending events in: Helsinki (Finland), Auckland and Wellington (New Zealand) and Edinburgh (the United Kingdom), during 2016–2018. Data is gathered through non-participant and participant observations, 67 in-depth semi- and unstructured interviews of event organizers and participants, short surveys, web research, and pictures and short video clips are used as mnemonic support. First, I strived to understand the practice of mending by identifying the matters of mending (Article 1). Then I used three effects arising from the produced affectivity of sociomaterial practices to explore mending. These conceptual effects were: creativity, learning and taste. Each effect then provided a framework through which to approach, analyse and understand the performance, learning and sustenance of mending practices. In the first instance, I categorized users as vernacular menders and understood their practices as situated, embodied and routinized, yet dynamic. The analysis revealed how when performing practices, menders methodically organized their practices while simultaneously creatively extending design in use (Article 2). In the second instance, I understood the learning practices of the vernacular menders as being anchored within the sociomateriality of practices rather than resulting from a purely cognitive process. The learned outcomes were: material learning, communal learning and environmental learning. Through the process of mending, the vernacular menders seemed to learn how to identify variations in material qualities, create communal bonds and form understandings of how to better care for their garments. The findings indicated the potential of informal learning platforms for finding sustainable local solutions to global ecological problems concerning garment waste (Article 3). In the last instance, the focus was on the role of the body and the interplay between the sensing body and the materials, to show how menders construct taste for and form an attachment to their practice over time. Their mending practices resulted in increasing the physical life, reshaping the symbolic life and redefining the aesthetic life of garments. In this way, people are seen as disrupting existing social and material orders by defying mainstream fashion practices, levelling off the playing field through active engagement in appropriating garments, mobilizing variations in dress practices, attuning to the matters that make up their clothing, while also forming an attachment to their practice (Article 4). Overall, in taking a non-cognitive approach to the study of mending, this study reveals the practices of menders as not merely reproductive but as dynamic and reflexive. In trying to understand how mending practices are performed, learned and sustained, the study also highlights the broader implications of mending that need attention in the current sustainable fashion discourse. Thus, the study invites future research to explore the practices of vernacular menders and to actively challenge fast fashion dictates towards the practices of caring, inclusivity and stewardship

Boundary objects, power, and learning: The matter of developing sustainable practice in organizations

This article develops an understanding of the agential role of boundary objects in generating and politicizing learning in organizations, as it emerges from the entangled actions of humans and non-humans. We offer two empirical vignettes in which middle managers seek to develop more sustainable ways of working. Informed by Foucault’s writing on power, our work highlights how power relations enable and foreclose the affordances, or possibilities for action, associated with boundary objects. Our data demonstrate how this impacts the learning that emerges as boundary objects are configured and unraveled over time. In so doing, we illustrate how boundary objects are not fixed entities, but are mutable, relational, and politicized in nature. Connecting boundary objects to affordances within a Foucauldian perspective on power offers a more nuanced understanding of how ‘the material’ plays an agential role in consolidating and disrupting understandings in the accomplishment of learning

Kiertotalouden liiketoimintamallien hallinta : Kiertotalouden asiakasarvon luominen, dynaamiset kyvykkyydet ja arvoverkostot

Our current production and consumption patterns heavily rely on limited natural resources and simultaneously produce negative externalities in the shape of waste and pollution. In order to become future-fit, business models need to integrate these increasing pressures and become aligned with a circular economy blueprint, in which waste is designed out and products and materials provide optimized value though their recirculation. In order to do so, we need a conceptual framework that enables entrepreneurs and managers to design their circular business model. Consequently, the dissertation seeks to provide articulated knowledge on the mechanisms enabling the development and implementation of circular business models. We do so, first by providing an integrated characterization of circular business models, definition and guiding principles (essay I). Second, by looking at the configuration of three main elements, namely the features and characteristics of (1) customer value creation, (2) dynamic capabilities and (3) value networks in the context of business model transformation towards a circular economy (essays II, III and IV). The findings contribute to the emerging theory building literature on circular business models. In practice, the outcome of this integrated framework allows managers and entrepreneurs to redefine their value creation mechanisms in light of circular economy principles.Nykyiset tuotanto- ja kulutuskäytännöt rakentuvat vahvasti uusiutumattomien luonnonvarojen käyttöön ja aiheuttavat samalla kielteisiä ulkoisvaikutuksia jätteen ja saastumisen muodoissa. Kiertotalouden mallit perustuvat jätteettömyyteen, ja tuotteet ja materiaalit tarjoavat optimoitua arvoa takaisinkierrätyksellään. Vastatakseen tulevaisuuden haasteisiin liiketoimintamallit on yhdistettävä kiertotalouden malleihin. Sen toteuttamiseksi tarvitaan käsitteellinen viitekehys, joka mahdollistaa yrittäjille ja johtajille kiertotalouden liiketoimintamallien muotoilun. Väitöskirja pyrkii tarjoamaan jäsennettyä tietoa kiertotalouden liiketoimintamallien kehittämistä ja toimeenpanoa mahdollistavista mekanismeista. Ensin tarjoamme kokonaisvaltaisen kuvauksen kiertotalouden liiketoimintamalleista, määritelmän ja ohjaavat periaatteet (essee I). Toiseksi tarkastelemme kolmen pääelementin kokoonpanoa, eli (1) asiakasarvon luomisen, (2) dynaamisten kyvykkyyksien sekä (3) arvoverkostojen piirteitä ja ominaisuuksia liiketoimintamallien muutoksen yhteydessä kohti kiertotaloutta (esseet II, III ja IV). Havainnot antavat oman lisänsä teoreettiseen kirjallisuuteen kiertotalouden liiketoimintamalleista. Käytännössä tämä integroitu viitekehys mahdollistaa johtajille ja yrittäjille arvoa tuottavien mekanismien uudelleenmäärittelyn kiertotalouden periaatteiden valossa.fi=vertaisarvioitu|en=peerReviewed