Session #105

– Workshop –

This workshop dedicated to repair proposes the idea of a satellite AHRA event hosted by the MSD (Melbourne School of Design), University of Melbourne. This event would stand as the culmination of a series of interdisciplinary seminars that are being hosted throughout 2023 at the MSD, with discussions dedicated to Repair in a Broken World. We are engaged in exploring how far acts of designerly care can be performed via the humble work of repair and maintenance. Repair, we argue, suggests a way of critically and creatively resisting the perpetual push toward innovation and the celebration of the new. Rather than creating something new, can we make do with the resources we already have available to us? We have been exploring the conditions of repair, and asking why repair is obliged to wait for the event of breakdown or disaster. Can repair instead be integrated into an ethos, or styles of life, that support rather than diminish our local environment-worlds? Can repair come first? For the AHRA 2023, we propose a workshop dedicated to the telling of repair stories throughout the afternoon, Melbourne time, with a concluding online discussion timed to coincide with a morning session (GMT) within the AHRA program in Portsmouth.