Abstract
Consumer media devices routinely expose humans and environments to sensing and data capture while obscuring their own operations, supply chains, and ecological impacts. This paper asks how such devices might instead support planetary awareness with care and transparency. Working with Minamata, Japan, as a paradigmatic case, we combine more-than-human design, media archaeology, and research-through-design evidence-based fieldwork to develop the Ecological Encounters Codesheet (EEC): a granular method for coding encounters across temporal strata, containment forms, risk regimes, opacity sources, and care practices. Applying the EEC to Minamata’s infrastructures, memorials, archives, and tourist ecologies, we derive a set of Remembrance Lenses that function as a design orientation for media devices. We show how this foregrounds adjacency, risk awareness, and care-led limits, repositioning media devices as speak-through ecological remembrance artifacts.
Keywords
more-than-human, media archaeology, ecological remembrance, Minamata
DOI
https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2026.428
Citation
Ogasawara de Oliveira, L., and Minamizawa, K. (2026) Minamata’s Ecological Encounters Codesheet: Designing Remembrance Lenses through more-than-human and media archaeology, in Simeone, L., Gray, C. M., Verhoeven, A., de Götzen, A., Bakırlıoğlu, Y., Zohar, H., Stead, M., and Buwert, P. (eds.), DRS2026: Edinburgh, 8–12 June, Edinburgh, United Kingdom. https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2026.428
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Included in
Minamata’s Ecological Encounters Codesheet: Designing Remembrance Lenses through more-than-human and media archaeology
Consumer media devices routinely expose humans and environments to sensing and data capture while obscuring their own operations, supply chains, and ecological impacts. This paper asks how such devices might instead support planetary awareness with care and transparency. Working with Minamata, Japan, as a paradigmatic case, we combine more-than-human design, media archaeology, and research-through-design evidence-based fieldwork to develop the Ecological Encounters Codesheet (EEC): a granular method for coding encounters across temporal strata, containment forms, risk regimes, opacity sources, and care practices. Applying the EEC to Minamata’s infrastructures, memorials, archives, and tourist ecologies, we derive a set of Remembrance Lenses that function as a design orientation for media devices. We show how this foregrounds adjacency, risk awareness, and care-led limits, repositioning media devices as speak-through ecological remembrance artifacts.