A story without end

To enable efficient searching and consistent interpretation of information, traditional metadata design practice emphasizes precisely delineated attributes. These sharp boundaries, however, reject data points that lie outside permissible values. For example, a Gender attribute with associated Male and Female values may appear perfectly clear and unambiguous, in line with traditional standards. Increasingly, however, people have begun to identify themselves as both, neither, other, or dynamic gender, rejecting cleanly separated Male/Female duality. In this project, student designers used critical design to explore how the descriptive infrastructure of a database might foreground, instead of restrict, the "residual"-a term that encapsulates the ambiguity and plurality masked by simple category structures like Male/Female. Our findings suggest that "writing" a database to exploit the residual is enmeshed with "reading" the content being structured. We identify three modes of reading that characterize these designs, and we describe how the residual emerges from each mode.