Abstract
Minerals are crucial to modern life because they are used to create materials, enabling technologies we use every day. However, a century of burgeoning consumerism, fueled by growth-oriented western capitalism, has led to an acceleration of resource extraction, which depletes mineral resources, accelerates climate change, and increases labor exploitation. The failures of sustainable development practices related to extractivism indicate ontological design challenges within the relational space connecting humans, minerals, and the natural environment. These challenges show how resource extraction effects, and is effected by, a paradoxical core- periphery worldview. In Africa, these worldviews reverberate intensely where mining communities are trapped in an endless cycle of extractive obesity, disrupting social, ecological, and cultural well-being.
Drawing from two decades of fieldwork within mining communities in Sierra Leone, Africa, this research investigates how design decisions and specific worldviews shape unsustainable mineral trajectories. It explores how design can reframe our relationship with resources and be leveraged to transition mineral-dependent economies toward more sustainable and equitable futures. Throughout this work, I draw from African decolonial theories, ontological design, and systems design, employing mixed- methods, place-based, and liberatory research methodologies to analyze mineral trajectories across two primary groups. The first is in the provincial artisanal mining communities in the Kono District of Sierra Leone. I explore Kono’s relationship with its minerals through six case studies from the pre-extractive past, the extractive present, and emerging post- extractive practices that delineate a possible future. The second examines consumption sites in American urban privilege zones, far removed from the aforementioned extractive reality. This research has also been shaped through ongoing collaboration with numerous industry activists, mineral specialists, and end users of these minerals up-and-down the supply chain.
The research presents an original reframing of design as “mineral choreo- graphy,” reorienting understandings of minerals as active agents in processes of socio-technical transition. Rather than treating mineral flows as static industrial processes, this work demonstrates that mineral systems are designed, choreographed, and contested spaces shaped by worldviews, agency, and power structures over time. The major contribution of this work is a “primer” comprising nine elements that establish a new domain of inquiry at the intersection of design, the extractive sector, and sustainability transitions. Collectively, these elements impact three main areas: Transition Design as a discipline, transitions in mineral resource systems in the extractive sector, and African mineral transitions. It establishes new Transition Design frameworks and tools that offer a systems-level perspective for analyzing mineral choreographies. It defines design as an active force within extractive industries that shapes mineral systems and their trajectories. Finally, it identifies frameworks for community-driven resource infrastructures that center local knowledge and agency as a means to powerfully reimagine mineral relations- enabling diverse actors, including mining communities, academic researchers, design practitioners, and policymakers, to activate post- extractive mineral futures.
