Mine Craft: New Design Histories of Mining

Abstract This project seeks to remedy the under-analysis of labor in histories of design by presenting a multidisciplinary genealogy of mining grounded in materialist design history. Labor practices intersect media and material, necessitating a historical framework that situates designed artifacts, systems, and spaces within a broader network of interrelated labor processes. The materials, processes, and geopolitics of resource extraction blur conventional boundaries between physical and virtual labor. Emerging from a larger project on how new design histories of mining might both challenge and inform contemporary discourses of ethical design practice, this article offers three case studies: cobalt mining, Minecraft gameplay, and cryptomining. The three are infrastructurally linked, as cobalt is a key component of the lithium-ion batteries that power contemporary computing. This linkage allows us to situate labor at the intersection of geological resource extraction, computational power, and design. All three case studies underscore the tension between representations of mining labor as autonomous and material practices of mining as wage labor. We propose that analyzing the relations between materials and labor, inclusive of but also beyond digital infrastructures, is a historical and practical problem for design.