Commoning repair : sheds, co-ops, guilds, bespoke artisans and services that resist the majority flows of throwaway culture

The critical paradigm of sustainability confronts design with many challenges, not least that of how to sustain the value of the existing product environment, as shortening product life cycles and fleeting consumer attachments typify the velocity of a throwaway material culture. Design educators and researchers have identified repair and related minor user practices such as collecting, second-hand exchange, DIY repair, tinkering and embalming as positive signs of resistance to the central problem of rapid product turnover and obsolescence, particularly as they provide insights for technically improving the design of product durability and service systems to extend the life of products (see Chapman, 2005; Cooper, 2010; Wakkary et al., 2010). Elsewhere we have discussed the difficulties experienced by the everyday consumer in attempting to go against the flow to have some thing repaired – like a shirt, a mobile phone, an appliance – within a product system geared to updating commodities; buying a replacement shirt we argue is frequently cheaper and more convenient, however, the end-user inadvertently foregoes opportunities to maintain things, develop competencies, learn about materials and tools (Gill and Lopes, 2011). As Rall (2015) conceives, ‘repair needs repair’. With this we intend to care about repair, proactively unearth and common the achievements of repair skills and services as part of the re-orientation required of a commons-oriented peer ‘economy’ and the sharing of resources governed by users and communities of contributors (Gibson-Graham et al., 2013). Repair practices and practitioner services are finding experimental, liminal flows for expressing the unique value of material and/or product durability and community resourcefulness – ‘unplanned durability’ in contrast to planned obsolescence according to Boradkar (2012) – with the power to redirect products into additional cycles of consumption and back into peoples’ lives. This paper will explore a selection of repairs with reference to the principles and processes of co-design, so important to sustainable design and, after Wakkary et al. (2010), its practice-oriented project to identify sustainable behaviours in multi-dimensional, interrelated practices of the everyday which often resourcefully bring designers, makers and enthusiasts together. ‘Commoning’ is Gibson-Graham et al.’s (2013) term for making, reclaiming and sharing the cultural, biophysical, and social resources of the commons required to take the economy beyond capitalist enterprise, the control of production and commodity logic. We will show that a practiceoriented approach to co-design in repair can demonstrate what commoning by sustainable design looks like and to pursue answers to questions about sustaining the value of material culture – resources, competencies, and meanings – within the sphere of the commons.