A landscape of repair (original) (raw)

Call for papers "Repair Matters" ephemera special issue, eds Valeria Graziano & Kim Trogal

This special issue of ephemera aims to investigate contemporary practices of repair as an emergent focus of recent organizing at the intersection of politics, ecology and economy. We wish to explore notions of repair and maintenance as crucial components for redefining socio- political imaginaries, away from the neoliberal capitalist dogma of throw-away culture and planned obsolescence.

Design's Role in Transitioning to Futures of Cultures of Repair

This paper traces a historical and conceptual terrain of cultures of repair from a decolonial and ontological design perspective, i.e., through decolonial design. In the face of present and mounting future challenges, particularly Climate Change, consequent migration and global unsettlement, indiscriminately reaching all geographies, cultures of repair afford ecological, social, and technological exemplars of adaptation and resilience. Yet neither the complexity of the trace nor the imperative for appropriation is adequately reaching designers. To explore filling this gap, a relational map is presented here, that aims to aide designers understand four key threads implicated in the destruction of cultures of repair—concealment; newness; techne; care—and three key moves toward revaluing cultures of repair— transferrability, reclassification, amplification.

Towards synergies between local repairers, citizens, designers, and public actors: the REVALUE project

2015

The on-going race towards innovation and growth, continuously sustained by new products, has shaped a "throwaway era" overwhelmed by waste. The European economy is surprisingly wasteful in its model of value creation and sustains a take-make-dispose system. To face with this challenge, the European Waste Framework Directive suggests a hierarchy for waste treatment based on the 3R: Reduce, Reuse, Recycle. This paper aims to present the REVALUE research program. REVALUE contributes to the Reduce and Reuse objective as it proposes local and adaptive strategies articulated around repair workshops. It is based on the assumption that improving collaboration between producers, citizens, repair workshops and public actors enables the emergence of eco-innovative waste management at a local scale supported by adapted business models. The overall objective of REVALUE is to develop innovative, self-sustaining repair networks at the city-level. This will be achieved by 1) defining the ...

Repair

Environmental Humanities, 2020

We are surrounded by broken things and environments, designed objects, spaces and systems in need of repair. Repair is a commonsense but partial answer to overconsumption and landfill crisis. It is conservative yet progressive. But as a concept and a material reality, repair can also overwhelm. With increasing technological complexity , and decreasing time, resources, and skill, the ethical and logistical questions around repair abound: What shall we care for, why, and how? Where to begin? In this context, we begin with design: linking the value of repair to design is central to developing an ethics of care in the environmental humanities. In doing so, we acknowledge that design, in its current form, is deeply complicit in environmental destruction.

Generative Repair and Graceful Decay: Interview with Caitlin DeSilvey

Diseña , 2023

Professor Caitlin DeSilvey works as a cultural geographer and lecturer at the University of Exeter. Her work explores the ways in which built environments change through aging, including processes of repair, decay, and wasting. She collaborates with photographers, architects, designers, repairers, heritage practitioners, and with students in her teaching. DeSilvey fosters sensibilities of how to collaborate with the buildings and structures that 'tell us what they need', and with the living ecologies that contribute to the transformation of these decaying matters, 'to allow them space in the future' of these environments.

A UTS Design Studies Project #repairdesign

Report, 2020

Design is deeply implicated in the urgent challenge of reducing waste in the twenty-first century. From hermetically sealed smartphones to fast fashion, from brittle plastic appliances to cheap chipboard furniture, we are living in a throwaway culture that is globally networked in a seemingly opaque system of mass-produced imports and waste exports. This, combined with planned obsolescence and technological complexity, means that repair can seem a distant and difficult possibility.

BUILDING WITH WHAT and WHO IS ALREADY THERE: Embracing CARE+REPAIR in architectural practice.

2024

This article introduces a combined CARE+REPAIR framework for architecture. It ties to recent scholarship on Broken World Thinking, that sees care and repair as opportunities (Jackson, 2014). The following CARE+REPAIR framework was established via practice-based research with aNNo architecten (www.annoarchitecten.be), who incorporate into their architectural projects ideas and strategies on repair and care. Based on their real-world projects this model provides a holistic approach to preserving existing structures while also encouraging change in benefit of people and their environments within a context of Broken World Thiniking. The model is organized into four quadrants, each representing a crucial area of architectural concern: the ecological, social, cultural, and wellbeing