The Throw-away Society we live in every second is not only built by the needs of consumers but also well-planned by market-driven designers and brands. They, or we, did so well in capturing and utilizing the desirability of goods that consumers have been educated to perceive that "new is better than old." We have got used to easily throw old things away instead of repairing them.

Repairing Society is a speculative design practice inviting us to imagine an alternative way of consumption and production that is opposed to our current Throw-away Society. It focuses on cultivating a stronger emotional attachment between objects and human through building a 'Repair not Replace' lifestyle. By encouraging repairing things, we can cultivate a longer relationship with objects and revive our bonds with old things.

Repairing Society was inspired by Kintsugi, the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery with lacquer dusted or mixed with powdered gold, silver, or platinum. It treats breakage and repair as part of the history of an object, rather than something to conceal. Kintsugi proposes that broken and old can be better than the new which resonates with the philosophy of the Repairing Society. In Repairing Society, people can keep and reuse old things by regularly repairing and repurposing. In this model brands and designers are required to consider, from the beginning of product development, how products can be easily repaired or repurposed.

To better illustrate the Repairing Society, I proposed a series of designed services and objects based on three topics below.

REPAIR: Broken is Better than the New

GRAFT: Recombining for Repurpose

AUTOTOMY: Design for Broken

Design Team

Xiaodong Ma

Xiaodong Ma Repaired Basket (3D Scanning and Printing) The rattan basket repaired with 3d scanning and printing by new repairmen. The composition of half original rattan and half 3d printed woven PLA make this basket hard to be defined as old or new. Ideally, objects give form to ideas, but they also provide us with permission to reimagine what is possible.

Xiaodong Ma Repaired Piggy Bank, Plate, and Cup (Kintsugi) The piggy bank, plate, and cup repaired with Kintsugi technique by traditional repairmen. Each breakage is highlighted with gold instead of being concealed. The golden joineries on the piggy bank tell the stories of its owner.

Xiaodong Ma Repaired Dish (Resin) The dish repaired with clear resin is made by new repairmen. Through the transparent resin, you can observe each broken vine declaring the history of this dish. And the history of objects should be cherished.

Xiaodong Ma Watering Cup #2 (Watering Neck + Cup)? This watering cup is a grafted product made with a plastic watering can spout and broken cup pieces. As its spout neck is vertical to the cup handle, every time I use it to water a plant. I feel like I am pouring tea for an old friend.

Xiaodong Ma Tea Mug (Teapot Handle + Mug) ?This Tea Mug is a grafted work made with an elegant ceramic teapot handle and an IKEA glass mug. The mesh and clash of vintage and modern make it much more interesting than the original pieces.

Xiaodong Ma Grafted Colander, Spatula, and Protractor? The colander is grafted into a soup spoon by getting its holes filled with plastic; This spatula is a grafted product made from a plastic barbecue fork. Its graft-designer endowed it with the function of the shovel by extending its surface area; The ruler is a grafted object made from a Protractor. It got a second life by being given a drawing function.

Xiaodong Ma Grafted Spoons (Old Spoon + New Spoon)? These two grafted spoons are great examples to embody the collaboration between old and new. The small one is the combination of a ceramic spoon head and a wooden spoon handle. They are merged with clear resin. The second is a grafted rice spoon made up of a plastic rice-spoon head and a wooden handle with an elephant woodcarving.

Xiaodong Ma Watering Cup #1 (Tea Pot Neck + Watering Body) This watering cup is a grafted product made with a ceramic teapot spout and a plastic watering can. The strong contrast of their sizes and using-context creates the aesthetic of Graft.

Xiaodong Ma Autotomy Chopsticks? Traditional chopsticks break disgracefully because of the structure of the wood fiber. Its messy broken section makes it hard to be repaired. The autotomy chopsticks leaving a groove in one side makes it break from the weaker groove and leave a clean broken part for later repairing and grafting.

Xiaodong Ma Autotomy Bowl Ceramic bowls usually break at the thinner parts, the walls, and rims. The base usually stays complete. Autotomy bowl with five bases can break into five small ones which can be easily repaired and grafted. It is a bowl holding the potential for five future lives.

Xiaodong Ma Autotomy Pencil Few pencils can be used up because graphite breaks easily. People throw pencils away when feeling frustrated after failing to sharpen it. The autotomy pencil splits its lead into multiple even-length pieces. The length of each lead is too short to break again, and users know where to start sharpening it. Through this way, the autotomy pencil can keep a longer serving life.

Xiaodong Ma A/B Society The differences between the Throw-away Society and the Repairing Society range from the perception of consumers, the business strategy of brands, product development and design, and many other aspects in our daily lives.

Three features of Throw-away Society

DISPOSABILITY

In the current Throw-away Society, everything is granted an artificially limited useful life by brands and designers to make them disposable almost as soon as the consumer has bought them. They are not made for owning and keeping while wrongly perceived as durable products through other cover-ups, like well-made packages, brand marketing, and undegradable materials. What is known as 'consumer durables' should more accurately be called 'consumer disposables' in today's transient technology where yesterday's new is today's old.

There is no difference between consumer products and foods in some ways because both are made to consume and their end-of-life date has already been set before they are distributed by manufacturers, which means they are both disposable. In comparison, the foods sold in groceries are more honest about what they are. They use a straightforward mark indicating their production date and expiration date, nutrition, and ingredients on packages, and remind consumers how to store and consume for longer shelf life. In contrast, the consumer products in the Throw-away Society intend to conceal this information to make people believe that they can decide whether or when to dump and replace.

WEAKENED BONDS

In the current Throw-away Society, everything is granted an artificially limited useful life by brands and designers to make them disposable almost as soon as the consumer has bought them. They are not made for owning and keeping while wrongly perceived as durable products through other cover-ups, like well-made packages, brand marketing, and undegradable materials. What is known as 'consumer durables' should more accurately be called 'consumer disposables' in today's transient technology where yesterday's new is today's old.

There is no difference between consumer products and foods in some ways because both are made to consume and their end-of-life date has already been set before they are distributed by manufacturers, which means they are both disposable. In comparison, the foods sold in groceries are more honest about what they are. They use a straightforward mark indicating their production date and expiration date, nutrition, and ingredients on packages, and remind consumers how to store and consume for longer shelf life. In contrast, the consumer products in the Throw-away Society intend to conceal this information to make people believe that they can decide whether or when to dump and replace.

PLANNED OBSOLESCENCE

Planned obsolescence is the core strategy and philosophy for our consumer society. It means that products last only for a period of time before they become useless or outdated. It was created to stimulate consumption and satisfy the desirability of consumers. Planned obsolescence, as a Consumerism-Education or a dogma, educates people to replace not repair and makes them believe the new is always better.

If planned obsolescence is an intentional and learned system, then brands function as the schools promoting these lessons and designers act as teachers responsible for planning and teaching.

A typical example is fashion design. Apparel designers change the types and styles of clothes every year. It is not because the new type is more comfortable than the old. The truth is, fashion designers understand that pursuing beauty is a kind of desirability and they keep sending a hint to the consumer: you will be as outdated as your clothes if you don't change them. As the trend for cuts and colors change, things that once looked great somehow look absurd.

So, you can see how powerful education can be. Designers' intentions did and will guide how people perceive and consume things, just like how teachers influence students.

Three Insights of Repairing Society

REPAIR (Broken is Better than the New)

In the Repairing Society, these traditional repair jobs are reviving, and more people are proud of being repairmen or apprentices of repairmen. It is valued by the culture, and we see that they repair goods, but they also repair our way of life. At the same time, new technologies, like 3d scanning, 3d printing, and memory materials, bring the evolution of repair techniques and the emergence of new repairmen. They are not limited to traditional repair work and are capable of repairing nearly anything.

Thanks to their repair work, old things enjoy more longevity through refreshing like the sharpened knife and polished boots. Broken pieces get their second life through repairing like rejoined ceramic cups and patched clothes. The prolonged life of things leaves an opportunity for their owners to cultivate intimate relationships with them.

GRAFT (Recombining for Repurpose)

Graft is a horticultural technique whereby tissues of plants are joined to continue their growth together. When the newly grafted branch merges with the old trunk, the recombined plant is hard to recognize as old or new because it has elements of both.

The competition between old and new doesn't happen in Graft. In Graft, they are collaborators. The new help the old survive and makes it usable. Correspondingly, the old shares its emotional attachment with its owner to the new. This win-win-situation reflects the advantage of Graft.

The concept of Graft can be used in the Repairing Society. The broken objects, or broken part of objects, can be recombined and converted into a new product which extends the function and usability of the originals. At the same time, it keeps the original objects, or part of original objects, to leave an opportunity for owners to continue cultivating/stacking bonds with old things.

AUTOTOMY (Design for Broken)

Autotomy is the behavior whereby an animal sheds or discards one or more of its own appendages, usually as a self-defense mechanism to elude a predator's grasp or to distract the predator and thereby allow escape. Some animals have the ability to regenerate the lost body part later. The organism of these animal's body is ready to be broken for the second life.

What doesn't kill it makes it stronger. 'Broken for the Second Life' is also a design ethic for the brands and designers in the Repairing Society. The things designed to be broken gracefully and cleanly make the later repairing and grafting work easier. Every time we repair something, we add to its potential, its history, its soul and its inherent beauty. In the Throw-away Society, most objects end up in a broken. Designers and brands don't care because they make living on it (the unrepairable broken-objects force consumers to buy a new one). However, in the Repairing Society, designers have a strong sense of making repairable things by always keeping autotomy in mind. They not only focus on how products are used but also how things are broken. It means the object's afterlife is well planned in the beginning.

3 CONCLUSIONS in Repairing Society

Plastic is not trash; Recycling doesn't exist.

In the Throw-away Society, plastic is debated as the most notorious material, and recycling is a central topic of most green movements. This consensus was made because of the dump, as the core of Throw-away culture, transits all materials into trash. Plastic becomes the most durable trash because it is non-degradable. The negative consequences related to plastic are determined by how people consume. Correspondingly, recycling is a way of turning trash back to raw materials for the next round of making-buying-dumping. However, in Repairing Society, all materials are designed to be repaired and repurposed. Things retain their origin or find another life through meshing with other pieces. It means nothing is dumped as trash. Plastic even becomes an indispensable material in the toolkit of Repairing and Grafting.

The attraction of evolving objects

Repairing Society educates consumers to cherish things. Repaired and Grafted objects have a unique attraction to their owner. If we parallel the object-human relationship with the human-human relationship, it is not hard to find that the evolving common value plays a vital role in the intimate relationship because humans are always in a state of change and quickly get bored with immutable things. Repaired and Grafted objects are evolving through combinations of appearance and function. The evolving life of objects creates the aesthetic of a complex and evolving narrative to owners. Things surprise their owners periodically to accumulate meaning to users. The relationship between humans and objects is no longer the subject-object relationship of using and being used but a long-term subject-subject connection.

Repairing Society vs 3R's Theory

3R's Theory, 'Reduce, Reuse, Recycle' is often debated. It can be traced back to the underlying movement of becoming environmentally conscious in the 1970s. It helps to cut down on the amount of waste we throw away. It hopes to conserve natural resources, landfill space, and energy.

However, the limitation of 3R's Theory is also apparent. 3R's just focuses on dealing with throw-away products by recycling instead of landfilling. It doesn't solve waste-and-pollution problems from the origin: Consumerism. It is like parents following children around to clean up their mess, the house is cleaner, but it doesn't educate children not to throw things. And the 3R's cleanup cannot keep up with the pace of "Overconsumption" all the time. The Repairing Society acts as an educator, not a cleanup tool. It intends to change people's perception of consumption.

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