1300 Pieces of Rubbish: A Collaborative Approach to Making Sense of Everyday Resource Sufficiency in the Home

Over a one-month period we ran an in-home study exploring the notions of frugality, resources conservation, and sufficiency amongst 40 urban and regional households across Australia. We used a Research-through-Design approach, adopting the design-led method of design research artefacts, which were all created from discarded items of household waste. What followed was an extremely rewarding but overwhelming time, which culminated in the return of 1,300 individual artefacts from our study participants. This pictorial illustrates and discusses our struggles to extract insights from this vast amount of data produced by this exploratory study and justify our findings. As such, this pictorial contains learnings from our experience deploying, receiving, sorting, and then analysing an overwhelming amount of design research artefacts to study everyday resource sufficiency in the home.