The Repair Workshops: New Life for Discarded Products
As part of Melbourne’s State of Design Festival held in July 2011 (funded by a City of Melbourne creative arts grant), Leyla co-hosted a five-day collaborative exploration into the practice of repair in all its forms.
We took over the basement of the beautiful historic Donkey Wheel House and let a group of 10 artists, engineers and designers came together to reimagine discarded products into functional items and an artistic exhibition.
This interactive installation also offered free one-on-one repair sessions to the community, sparking conversations about why we are losing the art of repair. Collectively, we salvaged over 2.5 tonnes of waste that would have gone to landfills by partnering with charities The Brotherhood of St. Lawrence and the St. Vincent de Paul Society.
Watch the Repair Workshop Video
The Inspiration
Redesigning for Repair
Inspired by the Repair Manifesto from Platform 21 in The Netherlands, the collaborators embarked on a creative exploration of how broken items can be redesigned with sustainability in mind.
We also redesigned the repair manifesto for the public exhibition, printed copies and shared them widely.
How we did it
Partly inspired by a statistic Leyla heard that charities have to spend millions of dollars to landfill donated items left outside charity stores, the repair workshops were about bringing together creatives with different skills to find creative ways of redirecting everyday goods from landfill to art and functional goods.
The Repair Workshops began with a three-day closed collaboration among the team of repairers. During this time, they worked intensively with the mounds of donated items, tinkering, mending, and reimagining them. The repaired pieces were then curated into an exhibition, celebrated with a launch party, and auctioned off to raise funds for Environment Victoria.
After this initial phase, the workshops opened to the public for a weekend of free repairs, with over 500 people coming through. More than 70 broken items were brought in for interactive repair sessions with our team of selected repairers, igniting passionate discussions around the importance of repair. From wedding toasters, see-through bubble guns and handheld egg beaters and CD players, there were lots of different items repaired over the tow days.
One of the project’s key objectives was to amplify conversations about repair. It received broad media coverage, including radio interviews and magazine features, which helped spark wider public dialogue. This momentum helped to inspire many new satellite projects to pop up, showcasing repair and strengthening the growing repair community.
“The whole project was about collaborative design. It was about exposing the issues of material flows, waste and how most products are designed to break—and then we think that the solution is to give them to a charity, but we just displace the burden onto them. The Repair Workshops highlighted the need to redesign products so that repairability is a core part of the design process.
It was extremely cool—the whole experience. One woman brought in the toaster she got for her wedding back in the 1950s, and she even brought a piece of toast in a Tupperware to test it after it was fixed. There are so many stories like this and like a small kid who brought in a broken plastic bubble gun. Seeing his face light up when it started working again was just magical.”
— Leyla Acaroglu
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