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Repair: Sustainable Design Futures
Markus Berger and Kate Irvin on the potential of repair and design’s role in proposing "radically different social, environmental and economic futures."

Abstract

This essay serves as a call to action in response to the state of today’s world that is so terribly shattered by late capitalist consumerism, dwindling resources, social inequity and climate change. In this context, we explore the potential of repair to express empowerment, agency and resistance to our unmaking of the world and the environment. Repair is presented as an act, metaphor and foundation for opening dialogue about design’s role in proposing radically different social, environmental and economic futures.

I. the Global Crisis

In her 1993 novel Parable of the Sower, Octavia Butler presents an apocalyptic vision of the United States in the year 2024: a society shattered by climate change, demagoguery, late capitalist consumerism, dwindling resources, social inequity and gun violence. These are amongst a host of other human-made ills that are referenced. It is a dystopia that feels uncomfortably prescient and shockingly close to instances of societal and environmental brokenness across the globe. In the world envisioned by Butler a society in shambles can be saved by allowing oneself to be malleable and flexible, by actively constructing one’s own life and community with care and commitment to mutual support: all that you Change Changes you.1 What Butler often refers to in her writing as “positive obsession,” which prioritizes betterment in defiance of fear and doubt, leads to sustenance and survival.

The voracious appetite of extractive policies, designed to sustain capitalist culture and global markets, have imperiled too many, causing risk and uncertainty.

As Butler presaged, around the globe in the opening decades of the twenty-first century, humanity has come to a moment of reckoning as we face the responsibility of conjuring “positive obsession” and collective betterment in a world fraught with cascading crises that are local, systemic, social, environmental, economic and political. Historical loss, ecological catastrophe, financial despair and institutional corruption have come to define a time of increasing uncertainty and unkept promises. Large countries are run by vocally racist, fascist, and hyper-nationalist leaders, and global economies are sustained by mass production and consumption. At the same time, corporations thrive as consumers proceed to replace one product with another, unaware or oblivious of unethical production systems that cause social destruction and ecological disruptions. The voracious appetite of extractive policies, designed to sustain capitalist culture and global markets, have imperiled too many, causing risk and uncertainty; unprecedented growth and extraordinary destruction; rapid decay; fragmentation, dissolution, and breakdown.

To open ourselves to the radical changes required by this critical moment, we must reconsider the value of the crack, the fissure - the wound.

The global crisis is ominous and dire, yet also ripe with opportunities for redress, for effecting a revolution in our thinking, imagination, actions and routines. To open ourselves to the radical changes required by this critical moment, we must reconsider the value of the crack, the fissure - the wound - as providing an opening and invitation for engaging with, tending to, and caring for the things and people around us, on an individual level, as well as in our civic and collective arenas, to connect the personal to the universal.

Patchwork juban (under-kimono), mid-1800s. Japanese. Gift of Cynthia Shaver. RISD Museum.

II. Sustainable Design Futures

This essay opens dialogues and proposes methods for designing alternative futures with empowered ethical and ecological commitments. We argue that radical and reparative re-thinking is required to combat and deconstruct the crippling systemic structures of imperialism, white supremacy, wealth inequality and socio-political and environmental injustice throughout the world. We present repair not only as a rejection of mass production and limitless consumption, a validation of undervalued and repressed labor, and a reimagined relationship to material quality, but, also, as an embodied act. It is a way of entering into and understanding design as a material-based practice that has the potential to foster renewed forms of social exchange at a global scale.

Radical and reparative re-thinking is required to combat and deconstruct the crippling systemic structures of imperialism, white supremacy, wealth inequality and socio-political and environmental injustice.

III. The “Homo Reparans”

In her book The Impulse to Restore in a Fragile World (2002), Elizabeth Spelman reminds us that humans have repaired since the beginning of their existence, fixing things, relationships, and ideas: “The homo sapiens is also homo reparans”.2 The history of human-made objects attests to this impulse. From the very first tools to the programming of artificial intelligence, ongoing adjustments have been required to aid in longevity and to further development. Even though objects, beings, systems and ideas require continuous maintenance and repair as they break, decay or fall into pieces, repair has been largely overlooked as an ontological and speculative topic outside of Spelman’s study. The act of repair is most often presented as a mundane task performed in the household or by the car mechanic, the shoe mender, or building maintenance person. In this context, repair is not seen as a creative and generative act but rather as a relief to a particular problem and as a way to keep going in the same vein, meaning life as usual.

IV. Transformation vs. the “quick fix”

In the face of breakdown, deterioration, collapse, or obsolescence, capitalist societies have traditionally tended to react by avoiding the underlying systemic problem and aiming instead to return to an original state or trajectory. This response of dodging deep-seated transformation in favor of a quick fix - for instance, fixing and patching holes within a city street without making actual structural adjustments to the road itself - might be called “first-order repair”.3 In contrast, in a June 2021 New York Times opinion article written in response to the pandemic, David Brooks brought forward an argument made by Mancur Olson in his 1982 book The Rise and Decline of Nations in which he concluded that Germany and Japan enjoyed explosive growth precisely because their old arrangements had been disrupted.4 The devastation itself, as well as the forces of American occupation and reconstruction, dislodged the interest groups that had held back innovation in each country. The old patterns that stifled experimentation were swept away, opening space for something new.

Sandusky Platter, ca. 1838 (detail of stapled repair on back). English. Gift of Edward B. Aldrich in memory of Lora E. Aldrich 35.259. RISD Museum.

V. Second-order change

Meaningfully engaging with the complexities of our world today - including wrestling with the detrimental thinking, actions and teachings that have led us to our present state of societal and environmental brokenness - demands profound change along the lines of what Olson noted in the aftermath of World War II. This shift necessitates large-scale, systemic amends that psychologist and philosopher Paul Watzlawick refers to as “second-order change.”5 Watzlawick, who worked extensively in the 1970s on ways of making positive social transformations, deemed first-order change to be a simplistic “commonsense” approach, limited to making change within an existing system. Second-order change, on the other hand, required deep questioning of the very assumptions around the problems to be addressed.6

Conceptualizing repair as second-order change expands the task from making simple adjustments to enable a continuation of what occurred before, to enacting thinking and practices that challenge the status quo.

Conceptualizing repair as second-order change expands the task from making simple adjustments to enable a continuation of what occurred before (i.e., a car mechanic replacing a standardized part), to enacting thinking and practices that challenge the status quo. This practice involves engaging with the broken, discarded, and disrupted not as an intervention limited to adjustments within existing structures, but as a complete transformation of the thing, system and relationship itself. The Latin root of the word “repair,” reparare, means “to pay attention to,” as well as “to make ready.” In this light we suggest that repair can be a tool for catalyzing change while also apologizing, clarifying, stitching up wounds, and for ensuring a reasonable amount of continuity in our lives - continuity of meaning, social relations and material consciousness.

VI. Repair as shifting meaning and values

Viewed this way, the act and process of repair provide entry points for sparking novel thinking and insights about how we might remake our social and physical worlds, as well as rethink the systems that support our being and inner lives. In Repair: Sustainable Design Futures (2023), authors from various disciplinary fields have reflected on the potential for enhancing our societies in ways that will allow for new learning and expanded creativity, imagination, and discovery. Here we seek to expand the meanings of “to sustain” and “to repair,” challenging their respective definitions - on the one hand, to maintain something at a certain rate or level, and on the other, to bring into another condition - by putting them together and witnessing the ways their meanings shift and bend in response to one another. If “sustain” refers to a practice meant to alleviate the depletion of natural resources and maintain an ecological balance, it cannot be disconnected from the need for change in the form of reparative/restorative social justice, food security and public health.

Questions addressed include: how might repair-thinking and repair practices challenge the ways in which we apply meaning and value to things, objects, and relationships? In what ways might this path lead to a more diverse and inclusive culture of shared and/or mutually respected values? How can we better understand the breakdown and failure of systems so that we can more effectively propose alternative forms of thinking through social and welfare systems and their economies? Can a deeper understanding of relationships in society and nature via brokenness and repair lead to less fear of uncertainty and the unknown?

Addressing societal breakdown via repair opens pathways to sustaining activism, developing stronger communities and expanding the life of products and buildings.

Addressing societal breakdown via repair opens pathways not only to building futures, but also to sustaining activism, developing stronger communities, expanding the life of products and buildings, and enabling the development of social and aesthetic mindsets and values that sidestep capitalist structures and strictures. Thinking with repair to envision sustainable design futures reaches beyond the more prosaic understandings of sustainability, sustainable design and green construction as approaches to finding solutions to environmental woes by innovating and creating anew. In this way, it might bring us closer to achieving the UCLA Sustainability Committtee’s characterization of sustainability as “the balance between the environment, equity, and economy.”7 Conceptualizing design futures via repair, repair serves as an invitation to a renewed form of community and social exchange, as well as an alternative, holistic way of facing environmental and social breakdown.

VII. A call for actions

In the spirit of a call for action, we argue for radically different ways of thinking and acting. We propose changes to current ways of being and doing, in ways that are not traditionally part of our academic curricula, practice, or everyday experiences. We must challenge and expand our work as designers, artists, students, teachers, museum staff and arts practitioners to re-think the values that we have inherited and follow blindly, and that continue to guide us. Processes of repair aid in this pursuit by prompting ideological and material inspiration in the forces of change that are evident in all that is existing, old, discarded and devalued by today’s capitalist society. Repair is a creative disruption. It is an act and concept that provides insight in far less intrusive ways than traditional modes of making, building, purchasing, processing and discarding. It allows us not only to tackle problems creatively, critically, directly and minimally, but also to embrace diversity and inclusivity in every respect.

The varied perspectives included here coalesce into an urgent declaration of shared intentions. It is a declaration that manifests in multiple calls for action built on the concept and practice of repair as the foundation for designing better futures by embracing change while tending to what is here and now. Each of the authors in this book calls for engaging with the world and its future(s) with creativity and imagination. In their own ways, they prompt us to actively respond to our immediate circumstances and look ahead, arguing for collective, unrestricted, unstructured and specific action in response to brokenness at all levels of our societies and our designed worlds. Repair in this context embraces and insists on change, serving as a critical tool for navigating our broken world in the spirit of an open-source project, as a generative twenty-first century response to the multitude of issues we face today.

Repair is a mindset and a design concept for innovative reuse and the remaking of everyday objects, spaces, buildings, as well as society at large. It fosters the creation of new futures.

Installation, Markus Berger and Emre Yalcin, 2019. Photo by Paolo Cardini.

Repair is a mindset and a design concept for innovative reuse and the remaking of everyday objects, spaces, buildings, as well as society at large. It fosters the creation of new futures. This essay issue a call for empowerment via reparative action directed at every human that engages with the world and seeks to imagine alternative futures creatively and critically. Our voices, together with many others, demand and call for a multiplicity of actions to change the status quo, to rebel against the impulse to continually acquire and advocate for the new. This is a call to open our eyes to injustice, to demand equality, and to deconstruct systems of power. Our ideas seek to inspire and encourage us to:

Re-Think our Communal Values

REJECT CAPITALIST DEFINITIONS OF BEAUTY
Repair allows us to develop social, aesthetic and value-based notions of beauty.

MAKE ROOM FOR MULTIPLICITY
Repair acknowledges multiple authors, pasts and futures.

CREATE WITH A COLLECTIVE MINDSET
Repair encourages us to design collaboratively and within a diverse group.

QUESTION EXISTING FRAMEWORKS
Repair challenges convention by asking more thoughtful questions.

EMBRACE THE IMPERFECT
Repair stands in opposition to perfectionism.

REIMAGINE ARCHITECTURE AND DESIGN
Repair inspires us to let go of the perceived wisdom of the singular designer/architect and create products that can be endlessly adjusted.

Re-Envision our Frameworks

BYPASS THE TEXTBOOK
Repair instigates alternative ways of learning and drives material-based research and innovation.

IMAGINE DIFFERENTLY
Repair motivates imagination, discovery, and creativity.

ENGAGE IN PLURALISTIC THINKING
Repair decenters locations of knowledge.

DEVELOP A COMMUNITY
Repair supports the restoration of craft and promotes autonomous economic and cultural vitality.

DESIGN COMMUNALLY
Repair involves community stakeholders to generate designs.

CREATE RELATIONSHIPS
Repair as a process awakens and strengthens our relationships with objects, systems, communities and individuals.

Ceiling, The Repair Atelier, 2021, Markus Berger

Create New Habits

CAP YOUR WASTE
Repair offers an alternative to adding to the waste stream and reduces energy demands.

CHANGE BUYING HABITS
Repair prompts cyclical consumption/appreciation of existing goods.

EXTEND MATERIAL LIFE
Repair gives materials and objects multiple lives.

INCORPORATE FLEXIBILITY
Repair acknowledges a spectrum of possibilities and outcomes for damaged goods.

CONSIDER MINIMAL INTERVENTION
Repair encompasses various definitions of completeness and embraces a range of actions that allow for the transition of a broken object to something that is functional.

RAISE YOUR ARMS
Repair generates social, political and environmental activism.

ReMake

REWORK THE PAST
Repair appropriates, transforms, and provokes critical re-evaluation of past values and uses.

RECOVER THE REPRESSED AND OPPRESSED
Repair aids in pairing together again (re/pairing) fractured identities, histories and relations.

RECONFIGURE, ADJUST, AND TRANSFORM
Repair creates alternative typologies, forms and experiences by reconfiguring and rearranging parts or elements into something new.

TAKE OVER
Repair sets new potentials into motion and unsettles ideas of single authorship, originality and authenticity.

FIGHT FOR EQUALITY AND JUSTICE
Repair stitches equality and justice into the narrative of our social fabric.

CREATE NEW FUTURES
Repair is a mindset and a design concept for innovative reuse and the remaking of everyday objects, spaces, buildings and society; it paves the way for envisioning alternative futures.


Excerpted and adapted from Repair: Sustainable Design Futures (Routledge, 2023) co-edited by Markus Berger and Kate Irvin.8

Bio

Kate Irvin is Curator and Head of the Department of Costume and Textiles at the RISD Museum. Her most recent collaborative initiative, Inherent Vice, comprises a year-long exhibition (2022–2023) and academic project that reframes collections care as a reparative, empathetic act that embraces both literal and metaphorical cracks as opportunities for revealing and making room for neglected narratives. Previously she curatedRepair and Design Futures (2018–2019), another multidisciplinary exhibition and programming initiative that investigated mending as material intervention, metaphor, and as a call to action. With Markus Berger, she co-edited a related book Repair: Sustainable Design Futures, published by Routledge in 2022.

Markus Berger is Professor of Interior Archi­tecture at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), a registered architect (SBA) in the Netherlands and founder and director of The Repair Atelier: an art/design workshop that investigates and activates ideas of reuse. His work, research, writing, and teaching are a critique on the ethics of modern architecture and focus on forms of change and repair in art, architecture, and design. Berger co-founded Int|AR, the Journal on Inter­ventions and Adaptive Reuse. His latest co-edited books are Intervention and Adaptive Reuse: A Decade of Responsible Practice, (Berger, Wong), Birkhauser, 2021; and together with Kate Irvin, Repair: Sustainable Design Futures, published by Routledge in 2023.

Notes

1 Butler Octavia E and N. K Jemisin. 2020. Parable of the Sower. New York: Grand Central Publishing
2 Elizabeth V. Spelman, Repair: The Impulse to Restore in a Fragile World (Boston: Beacon Press, 2002), p. 1.
3 “First-order repair” is based on “First-order change” by Paul Watzlawick, J.H. Weakland, and R. Fisch. Change: Principles of Problem Formation and Problem Resolution (New York: Norton, 1974).
4 David Brooks, “The American Renaissance Has Begun,” New York Times (June 17, 2021). Mancur Olson, The Rise and Decline of Nations (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982).
5 Paul Watzlawick, J.H. Weakland, R. Fisch. Change: Principles of Problem Formation and Problem Resolution (New York: Norton, 1974).
6 Markus Berger, “Constructing Change: Developing a Theory for Adaptive Reuse,” The International Journal of the Constructed Environment (Vol. 2, no. 1, 2012).
7 See https://www.sustain.ucla.edu/what-is-sustainability/, accessed May 20, 2020.
8 Berger Markus and Kate Irvin. 2023. Repair : Sustainable Design Futures. London: Routledge Taylor & Francis group.

Published
20 Jan 2023
Reading time
17 minutes
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