Making Things Apart: Gaining Material Understanding

This pictorial explores the material resources that can unfold through taking things apart. We describe a workshop program and according exercises designed around four particular modes of disassembling (interactive) artefacts. These exercises aim to provide low-threshold engagements with artefacts and the materials those artefacts are composed of. Based on a series of workshops we conducted following this program, we depict nine different forms of material resources that are unveiled through taking things apart. With this distinction we aim to contribute to the understanding of how the material histories of components and the rules that were governing their previous relations, are carried over to new compositions during reuse or reinterpretation.