Reweave

Papua New Guinea, a country with over three-hundred tribes, eight-hundred languages spoken, and beautiful landscapes, is plagued with poverty, corruption, and political unrest. In the past, indigenous populations residing in the central regions of the island were forced to relocate from their homes to make way for unregulated mines. This caused a concentration of various tribes to settle along the coastline. The lack of a common language contributed to tribes concentrating in clusters. The area of focus in this project is the largest such region, Port Moresby, which happens to be the capital city of PNG. All of these factors ultimately led to extremely poor living conditions, resulting in Port Moresby being ranked as one of the least livable cities in the world. The uncontrolled expansion of informal settlements raises a huge concern for the health, safety, and security of those living in them.

In this project, we aim to study and understand these informal settlements, and propose potential long-term solutions factoring in the political and social constraints of Port Moresby. Our research methods will be qualitative and quantitative, consisting of finding relevant data pertaining to the region and its inhabitants - as well as first-person perspectives of the residents combined with speculation and critical analysis.

Our proposed solution, Reweave, is a concept for Housing and Sanitation, weaving communities together into ‘micro settlements’ that replace the dangers of informal housing. The desired outcome is to establish a circular economy and start a positive feedback loop through community participation by leveraging the factors that have the largest potential impact - Sustainable Housing & Sanitation. 

How might housing and sanitation systems be designed to support long-term resilience, health, and community cohesion within informal settlements, while operating within the political, social, and resource constraints of Port Moresby? 

The project employed a mixed-methods research approach combining qualitative and quantitative analysis. Secondary research focused on political history, urbanisation patterns, public health data, and infrastructure conditions in Port Moresby. This was complemented by first-person accounts, case studies, and critical speculation to understand lived realities beyond statistics.

The design approach treated informal settlements not as failures to be erased, but as adaptive responses to displacement and systemic neglect. Community participation, modularity, and circular systems were used as guiding principles to ensure solutions remained flexible, scalable, and locally intelligible.

Reweave proposes a network of modular “micro-settlements” that integrate housing and sanitation into cohesive, community-scaled systems. These micro-settlements replace unsafe informal housing with adaptable structures built from locally sourced materials, allowing residents to incrementally expand and modify their living environments.

Sanitation is embedded directly into the spatial logic of the settlement, using decentralised waste and water systems that reduce contamination risks while contributing to a circular economy. By aligning housing, sanitation, and social infrastructure, the project aims to initiate a positive feedback loop driven by community ownership, health improvements, and environmental resilience.

Rather than a single master plan, Reweave functions as a flexible framework capable of evolving alongside social, political, and ecological conditions.

Speculative visualisations illustrate how Reweave’s micro-settlements could evolve over time, demonstrating improved living conditions, and ecological resilience without relying on large-scale displacement or complete redevelopment. 

Reweave was the first project in which I engaged directly with sustainability at a systemic scale. Coming from a product design background, working across housing, sanitation, policy constraints, and social structures was unfamiliar territory. However, the shift from small-scale, object-level design to analysing relationships, actors, and events at a much broader scale felt instinctive. I found myself drawn to understanding how multiple social, political, material, and environmental systems intersect and interact with one another.

The project was grounded primarily in human-centred design principles. The focus on health, safety, dignity, and community participation was intentional, given the immediate risks faced by residents of informal settlements in Port Moresby. At the time, prioritising human wellbeing felt both necessary and ethically appropriate. Importantly, this human-centred approach was positioned adjacent to ecological concerns, as a means of enabling coexistence with surrounding natural ecosystems through resilient housing, sanitation systems, and locally sourced materials.

In retrospect, Reweave also revealed the limits of sustainability-focused design when viewed through a longer-term lens. While the project proposed circular systems and adaptive housing strategies, it largely framed nature as a resource to be managed rather than an active agent within the system. This became clearer in later work, particularly when I revisited Reweave through a regenerative lens during The Nook. That critique helped me recognise how sustainability can sometimes stabilise existing paradigms rather than fundamentally transform more-than-human relationships.

Despite these limitations, Reweave played a formative role in shaping my practice. It marked a clear evolution from isolated product thinking and toward systems-led design, embedding social, material, and spatial considerations proactively. The project laid the groundwork for my continued interest in large-scale interventions, participatory systems, and design’s role in mediating complex socio-environmental challenges.