Provocative Objects: Stranded Marine Waste and the Unfinished Histories of Design

Provocative Objects / Spaces

28 January, 2026 -

A sorry piece of polymer (Figure 1). Despite its apparent yet inevitable out-of-placeness, nibbled on by fish or birds, and having a dismembered crab claw stuck to its back, its colour, contours, and squishy substance signal its former function as likely an object of pleasure. This former sex toy, having spent significant time in the ocean, has washed up—not as coincidentally as it seems—on a northwestern beach of one of the Ryukyu Islands. Having ridden the waves of ocean currents and broken waste streams, and now lingering among a sea of other tenacious objects, this rubbery thing resembling a female torso prompts reflection on where material, and by implication, design histories (ought to) end. Following earlier work that foregrounds everyday objects in design history (e.g. Judy Attfield 2000, John Heskett 2002), and books such as the edited volume Design History Beyond the Canon by Kaufmann-Buhler et al., design history is no longer simply about narrating design styles and ought to record the failures and potentials of design (2019: 3-4). 

A ‘unique’ find among the beached debris, and despite its pastel colour almost disappearing into the sand, its presence in this context arouses unease. Yet, more troubling is how its physical residue persists. Persistence after a thing has surpassed its use value is both a material and a system problem and therefore part of its history. However, the afterlives of things, and the systemic failures they reveal, are rarely recorded as such (if they have recorded histories at all). Despite this, some efforts have been made to address the lack of acknowledgement of designed objects’ “uncanny persistence” (Walton and İlengiz 2022: 348). Stefan Krebs and Heike Weber’s edited volume The Persistence of Technology: Histories of Repair, Reuse and Disposal (2021) addresses the “manifold temporal dimensions” of persistent technology, for example. And, in Sifting the Trash: A History of Design Criticism (2017), Alice Twemlow reframes the history of design criticism by tracing moments in which critics engaged with the afterlives of designed objects.

Moreover, Walton and İlengiz (2022) dedicate a special issue to material afterlives—inquiring into “the objects that remain after a subject’s vitality has ebbed”, observing how, “in the wake of lives led, objects and materials cluster, accumulate, and form unexpected constellations” (2022: 348-49). Forming part of such a constellation that developed on the beach, the life of another former toy persists along the same shoreline. A bright green knock-off cartoon bubble wand vaguely resembling Spiderman has its wand broken off but its Spiderman figure intact (Figure 2). Besides the problem of marine waste, the systemic lack of consideration for a product’s end-of-life, and the need for a rethinking of design histories and their conclusions, this object signals issues of low-cost globalised production and unauthorised adaptation of popular culture characters. These are issues that point to the larger context of the systems and processes that allow for these objects to come into being, emerging as a constellation in its own right. This is a constellation of cultural and material production under capitalist accumulation, in which design and its knock-off variants exist, persist, and demand recognition of the untold histories of their afterlives as the ocean spews them onto the beach.

Persistent objects “haunt”, as per Jacques Derrida’s hauntology, the contexts in which they end up. In the case of marine waste, beaches (also oceans) are turned into sites for “encounter[s] with broken time” (Fisher 2012: 19), revealing traces of design decisions and material economies. Also the endurance of the yellow jerrycan with its intact push tap (Figure 3), still fully functional yet ever so ghostly, points at such broken time: at a life cut short, an unintended afterlife, a production fiasco, a dysfunctional waste stream—at ruptures of design and disposal. The jerrycan’s constellation, as it has joined the little eroded sex toy and broken bubble wand on the beach, reflects Walter Benjamin’s constellation: it presents discontinuity—fragments of history arranged out of sequence yet revealing connections between objects, events, and realities that conventional chronological narratives obscure (Gilloch 2002: 87, 103, 240). The stranded objects as well as the beach that hosts them, are far from coincidental, passive instances or sites of accidental afterlives. They are active nodes in the histories of things and in the histories of the systems that bring these things into existence. They therefore provoke not only new thinking about where design histories (ought to) end, but also about how these histories ought to be narrated as non-linear temporalities.

References

Attfield, Judy. 2000. Wild Things: The Material Culture of Everyday Life. Oxford: Berg.

Fisher, Mark. 2012. ‘What is Hauntology?’, Film Quarterly 66.1: 16-24. https://doi.org/10.1525/fq.2012.66.1.16

Gilloch, Graeme. 2002. Walter Benjamin: Critical Constellations. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.

Heskett, John. 2002. Toothpicks and Logos: Design in Everyday Life. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Kaufmann-Buhler, Jennifer, Victoria Rose Pass, and Christopher Wilson (eds.). 2019. Design History Beyond the Canon. London: Bloomsbury.

Krebs, Stefan and Heike Weber (eds). 2021. The Persistence of Technology: Histories of Repair, Reuse and Disposal. Bielefeld: transcript Verlag. https://doi.org/10.14361/9783839447413

Twemlow, Alice. 2017. Sifting the Trash: A History of Design Criticism. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

Walton, Jeremy F. and Çiçek İlengiz. 2022. ‘Introduction: Afterlives in Objects’, Journal of Material Culture 27.4, 347-358. https://doi.org/10.1177/13591835221132197

 

Anneke Coppoolse is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Visual Communication Design at Hongik University in Seoul, South Korea. Her work is situated at the crossroads of culture and design. It has engaged with marginalised materialities (waste, unwanted objects) and visualities (wastescapes, changing façades, disappearing neon signs) of cities. She is currently exploring more-than-human relations and ruderal ecologies in disturbed “wasteland” spaces, specifically through the lens of weeds—mugwort, in particular—in South Korea.

 

Started by the DHS Ambassadors in 2022, the Design History Society's Provocative Objects and Places blog looks at spaces and objects that challenge and confront us as design historians. We invite submissions for guest blog posts from students, early career researchers, and established academics to those with a general interest in design history. Posts can be on any object or place from any era, anywhere in the world, which in some way encourages discussion and debate. Posts should be 500-800 words, accompanied by at least one image with associated credits and clearances, and a short bio. Please contact the DHS Senior Administrator, Dr Jenna Allsopp-Douglas for more information.