Design and the right to repair

Repair has been repeatedly neglected from the waste conversation or ‘war on waste’ and has been detached from design practice and criteria. As a result, goods are being replaced instead of fixed commonly due to a consumerist state of mind (Packard 1960), a lack of provision for spare parts and the unfeasibility of disassembly. A number of factors have led to this condition including neoliberal economies investing in built-in obsolescence (Cooper 2016) and insufficient policies to prevent discarding instead of repairing (Johansson and Corvellec 2018). An extra layer of complexity has been added by the digital economy and copyright laws, turning the right to repair into an illegal activity (Perzanowski and Schultz 2016). This Conversation aims to challenge how design designs circumstances of waste by opening a dialogue on its agency to recompose the ethics and responsibility, rules and practices of making. To enhance the discussion, contemporary examples such as in-house repair as well as open source and DIY movements will be examined, and practitioners and educators will be encouraged to interrogate their own practices. The final part of the Conversation will be dedicated to a collective exploration of alternatives, such as potential schemes of design for repair.