Book Overview. Repair: Sustainable Design Futures

Abstract

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.