Repair on the Move

Long description

Repair on the Move is a design lab project that will see Relative Creative, a strategic design practice based on the Gold Coast, develop a programme of critical design communications over 2021 that reimagine and recode cultures of repair. Currently in idea stage, the project responds to more than a decade of critical design research into cultures of repair, climate crisis, transitions, unsettlement and futures by co-directors Tristan Schultz and Bec Barnett. The project tasks the lab’s designers to visually communicate ways to transfer and adapt cultures of repair to the local Gold Coast community, culminating in an end of year exhibition.

Repair on the Move explores the affordances of repair moving through the climate crisis in six scenarios, each articulated through a near-future design fiction:

1. Appliance repair skills migrating across cultures
2. Travelling repair cultures amplified by climate refugees
3. Furniture repair and retail for nomadic communities
4. Detritus scavengers and bricoleurs on extreme weather Country
5. Indigenous Knowledge restoring lifezones
6. Reading repair in Country-agency patterns

Through this process we respond to the manifold impacts of the waste created by a modern western world, tracing the impacts of colonialism, cultures of newness, concealment, disassociation and degradation of care and repair practices. As we unpack each scenario further we will create the structures of believable futures such as job advertisements, short stories, animations and other communication pieces to communicate these futures of repair to the local community.

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