Diseña

Postcards from Abroad

2023-08-28T21:39:49-04:00

In this section called ‘postcards from abroad’ we propose to diversify and open up the understandings and practices of repair itself, engaging material repair in conversation with other types of repair, coming from fields of creation and knowledge other than design. Although there could be many other ‘postcards’ from different reparative places, here we invited: DNA repair in the field of genetics; soil bioremediation from the perspective of edaphology; psychotherapy as a form of emotional and psychological ‘repair’; memory repair from the field of restorative justice and human rights; home maintenance and cleaning as a form of domestic infrastructure repair and care; repair of electrical and electronic devices by activist collectives for waste prevention; repair of scientific observation instruments in the field of astronomy; and neuro-rehabilitation and physical rehabilitation from the first-person experience of long COVID. We hope these postcards provide a plurality of visions and actions on repair that might lead to resonances, inspirations, and cross-fertilizations among the various forms of repair.

Editorial: Repairing Design: Damage, Care, and Fragilities

2023-10-20T16:30:58-03:00

Installed in a climate crisis derived from what has been named the Anthropocene, it is urgent to review the role that design has played, in complicity with the industry and the market, in this eco-social damage at a planetary scale. For this purpose, we propose to take repair as a heuristic from which to interrogate the practice of design and its products. The reason is that the position that repair occupies―having to confront and respond to the failures and ruptures derived from design decisions―constitutes a privileged point of view from which to question and revise material and disciplinary limits: the what, who, how, when, where, why, or for what of design practices. Some fundamental questions that run through these two volumes (#23 and #24) are: How could repair be an ally of design? Or, how can a “reparative design” avoid or minimize eco-social damages?

Before Repairing: Pausing and Knotting Discomfort

2023-05-19T18:35:57-04:00

In this work, we reflect on a speculative pedagogical exercise in which we recorded, and invited others to record, through and with knots, situations of our daily lives related to forms of containment and entrapment. Accompanying this creative and collaborative work allowed us to materialize situations of vulnerability and unease (as knots), as well as the difficulty of registering these discomforts (through knots). We are interested in presenting this exercise as an embodied design practice. We also want to highlight how the staging of vulnerability and unease―made through material practices― generates contemplative pauses that have the power to make the fragility of life visible, and thus anticipate the need for repair. We argue here that repair, as a practice linked to design, is a making that deserves to be propitiated by contemplation and catharsis, in the face of damage and fragility in capitalist contexts.

Thinking from Fragility

2023-05-09T12:17:59-04:00

The purpose of this article is to claim the need to re-imagine contemporary ethical and political vocabularies from a radical recognition of―and confrontation with― fragility. More specifically, this article seeks to highlight the importance of cultivating an awareness of those moments when bodies, objects, and the worlds we inhabit begin to crack and reveal their fragility; and the relevance of recovering these moments as spaces from which to open up alternative ways of thinking and imagining. On the one hand, this article will argue for the necessity of thinking from fragility, as an opportunity to rectify the arrogant refusal to think about limits that has characterized much of modern thought, which can be achieved through an attention to practices of care, repair, and maintenance. On the other hand, it will advocate for thinking from these practices as means to cultivate forms of attention to what remains after rupture, and to claim it as a space from where to imagine which ethics and politics are possible beyond collapse.

Caring, Repairing, and Reimagining: Experiences from the Rural World

2023-05-25T21:50:16-04:00

In the era of the Anthropocene and amidst a severe environmental crisis, part of humanity has set out to imagine new ways of addressing global warming, hyper-production of goods, and massive waste generation. Academia and public policies have placed their focus primarily on urban areas, neglecting the experiences that the rural world can offer us. Reversing this trend, this article focuses on a rural sector of the Central Valley of Chile to reveal how, through daily and ‘artisanal’ practices, it is possible to reimagine notions such as creativity, innovation, and adaptability, in the face of changing environments. Specifically, it recognizes the dynamic way in which the inhabitants of rural sectors comprehend objects and the environment; their particular way of living space and time within the local geography; and the role that their tools, technologies, practices, and knowledge play in the daily production of their homes.

Reality Holes. Undesigning the 20th Century in Eastern Estonia

2023-05-29T23:25:31-04:00

Through the study of mining holes that have appeared in Kohtla-Järve, this article shows how repair work can take on a political charge by re-ordering the social and materializing different dimensions of care. In this regard, the investigation of situated forms of material failure leads us to reconsider who has, or should have, the responsibility to fix what is broken, and how repair is linked to questions of future-making and care. The conclusion points, first, to the fact that repairing entails facing the harmful consequences of past design decisions, long after; second, that, when projecting post-extractivist futures, we must confront the need to undo the pernicious elements of modernity; and third, that critiques about the social and ecological cost of infrastructural failure must include the perspectives of local population.

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From the Cloud to the Landfill: The Case of the Agbogbloshie Makerspace Platform and Akwasi Bediako Afrane’s TRONS

2023-06-12T19:13:51-04:00

This contribution sheds light on discarded electronics repair in Accra, Ghana. After placing these practices in dialogue with the Western and Eurocentric narratives around the materiality of digital interactions and infrastructure, it delves into two arts and design contexts that gravitate around the electronic waste landfill and processing site of Agbogbloshie (Ghana). The first case study is the Agbogbloshie Makerspace (AMP), a critical making (and unmaking) platform empowering local repairers and dismantlers through open-source collaborative design methods. The contribution then focuses on the work of Akwasi Bediako Afrane, a Ghanaian media artist who re-appropriates discarded computers to critique and speculate on our sociotechnical condition. Situating these initiatives in the light of our broader dominant internet and computing narratives, the article situates the importance of these practices in order to tackle and raise awareness about the planetary electronic waste condition we live in.

Transformative Repair x ADC: Visual Analysis of Works

2023-05-08T18:00:51-04:00

This visual essay evidences how visual arts professionals from art, craft, and design disciplines are able to transform broken and waste materials in ways that are complementary, but not usual, to their current professional practice. Photos, sketches, and technical drawings illustrate a collection of case studies concerning the transformative repair and reuse of a range of categories, including furniture, homeware, model airplanes, clothes, tools, and vehicles. The article concludes that this collection of works contributes knowledge to creative forms of repair and reuse as an underdeveloped and under-researched practice within circular design and economy.

Going for Gold: A Medal of Dishonor

2023-07-04T18:36:01-04:00

The work sets out to show the imperative of design and its ambiguity. The methodology used was narrative theory. The result was a polemic. The conclusion was: for repair to be ethical, it has to be predicated upon ethical norms.

Book Overview. Repair: Sustainable Design Futures

2023-04-04T10:14:01-04:00

Repair, a humble act born of necessity, has become in the 21st century an expression of artistic and discursive resistance to humankind’s unmaking of our societies and our environment. As a concrete practice, it serves to bring us together, to re-engage with materiality, and to invite us as consumers back to understanding the contexts of makers and making. As a metaphor and speculative meta-concept, it gives us an alternative and holistic way to attend to and face systemic social and environmental breakdown. To expand upon our respective approaches to repair in concept and practice, we issued a call for reflections on repair thinking and practices in the realm of art and design, resulting in the volume Repair: Sustainable Design Futures (Routledge, 2023), edited by us. This essay provides an overview of the book, highlighting the voices and artwork of the international, interdisciplinary group of authors included in the volume, speaking to multiple forms of brokenness and repair as entry points for sparking novel insights into how we might attend to our broken social and physical worlds. As a constellation of reflections on repair thinking and practices, the essays included in the book offer reparative responses to fractured systems, relationships, cities, architecture, and objects. Together they posit repair thinking as a way of addressing and nurturing our broken world.

Generative Repair and Graceful Decay: Interview with Caitlin DeSilvey

2023-09-27T14:03:10-03:00

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.

Caitlin DeSilvey is the author of Curated Decay: Heritage Beyond Saving (University of Minnesota Press, 2017); a co-author of Heritage Futures: Comparative Approaches to Natural and Cultural Heritage Practices (UCL Press, 2020); and a co-editor of After Discourse: Things, Affects, Ethics (Routledge, 2020).

Circles and Mistakes: Interview with Tim Ingold

2023-09-18T17:41:43-03:00

Tim Ingold is a British anthropologist, Social Anthropology Professor at the University of Aberdeen, Fellow of the British Academy, and Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. He has explored the relationship between anthropology, architecture, art, and design; and through his work, has invited us to ‘think through making’ and ‘learn by doing’.

Ingold is the author of Evolution and Social Life (Cambridge University Press, 1986); Lines: A Brief History (Routledge, 2007); Making: Anthropology, Archaeology, Art and Architecture (Routledge, 2010); and Anthropology: Why it Matters (Polity, 2018), among many other books. In this interview he responds to some questions about the practice of repair in his own daily life, but also the role and comprehension of repair in his intellectual work, and the possible connection between such action and the act of design.