Reclamations: On the Making and Remaking of Sand as a Medium for Design
Dissertation Project by Michaela Büsse
In my dissertation project "Reclamations: On the Making and Remaking of Sand as a Medium for Design” I research how sand’s transformation into land unsettles abstract and prescriptive design narratives. Located at the intersection of design studies, anthropology, science and technology studies and political ecology, the project investigates the tools and practices that render sand material, resource and asset. Rather than understanding our built environment as the naturalised background of modern society and its design my project attends to the practices that make and remake environments.
My multimodal and multi-sited ethnography follows the journey of sand, encompassing fieldwork in mining and reclamation sites, interviews with researchers, engineers and fishers as well as the critical analysis of planning and simulation tools, models, promotion and policy documents. From standardisation efforts in geography by US-based researchers during the 18th century to current illegal mining sites in the Philippines and Vietnam, from geopolitical tensions between Singapore and Malaysia, to the recent paradigm of Building with Nature in the Netherlands, my fieldwork traces the making of land and challenges linear histories.
By drawing on Lucy Suchman’s “critical anthropology of design,” I deconstruct how design practices bring about materials and how, in turn, material activity constitutes the formation of these practices. Despite the mostly extractive processes linked to sand’s transformation I offer a reading that utilises its granularity to stage alternative openings. Turning sand into a medium and interscalar vehicle allows me to bring together local specificities with transnational narratives. The resulting global assemblage oscillates between the scales and emphasises asymmetrical and emergent phenomena. Mudfish that flourish in silted coastal strips due to failed reclamation, fishers who collaborate with developers in ecotourism or locals who reappropriate bare strips of land for flying their kites — the project is both critical and speculative, theoretically informed and led by the encounters I had during my field work in Southeast Asia and the Netherlands.