Making Design Circular Podcast – Season 4 – Exploring Broken: Mending and repair in a throwaway world

Welcome to season four of Making Design Circular with Katie Treggiden, in which we’re exploring what it takes to cultivate a creative practice in which you, your business and the planet ALL get to thrive. We’ll be diving deep into the nuances, complexities and mindset shifts that we need to embrace to bring about a just transition to a more circular economy.

This week Katie is doing something a little different.

As you may have heard her mentioned in the previous episode, her latest book, Broken: Mending and repair in a throwaway world came out in April of this year, and she will be reading you the wonderfully. Thought-provoking  introduction to give you a flavour of the book.

Here are some highlights:

Making a statement

“Although any form of mending or repair could be seen as a form of activism in today’s single use culture, many of today’s artists, menders and remakers are choosing to make a statement with their work. A broken object delivers frustration because it doesn’t achieve its functionality says Paulo Goldstein, on page 122. But the same principle applies to a broken system that people profiled in repair as activism are deliberately using repair to point a finger at what is broken.” 

Broken World Thinking

“If we want new and better stories, and world orders, ones that are better for all of us, not just a tiny minority, we can’t look away any longer. We need to hold the stare with what is broken, with what can be repaired or remade, and what needs to be cleaned up and let go. The act of noticing, of paying attention and asking questions enables us to hold space for two radically different realities. Realities that Jackson describes as a fractal world, a centrifugal world an almost always falling apart world on the one hand, and a world in a constant process of fixing and reinvention, reconfiguring and reassembling into new combinations and new possibilities on the other. He describes our broken world as a world of pain and possibility, creativity and destruction, innovation and the worst excesses of leftover habits and power, and suggests that the fulcrum of those two worlds is repair. The subtle acts of care by which order and meaning and complex socio technical systems are maintained and transformed. Human value is preserved and extended, and the complicated work of fitting to the varied circumstances of organisations, systems and lives is accomplished.”

Broken: Mending and repair in a throwaway world

Katie’s sixth book celebrates 25 artists, curators, menders and re-makers who have rejected the allure of the fast, disposable and easy in favour of the patina of use, the stories of age and the longevity of care and repair. Accompanying these profiles, six in-depth essays explore the societal, cultural and environmental roles of mending in a throwaway world.

Cultivating Hope, 3 part mini course: Are you ready to cultivate hope in the face of the climate crisis? Sign up to Katie’s three-part free mini course that will help you move through feelings of helplessness, reconnect with nature and take aligned action.

Making Design Circular membership: An international membership community and online learning platform for environmentally conscious designers, makers artists and craftspeople – join us!

Spread the Word:

Please share Making Design Circular with Katie Treggiden with wild abandon — with your friends, family, and fellow designer-makers or wherever interesting conversations about creativity happen in your world!

If you love what you’re listening to, show us some love by following Circular with Katie Treggiden in this app and leaving a review. All that good stuff tells the ‘algorithm Gods’ to show the podcast to more people, and that can only be a good thing, right?

Sign up for our my e-newsletter ‘Weekly(ish) Musings for Curious, Imperfect and Stubbornly Optimistic Environmentalists’ – just click here.

And find me on the Interwebs:  @katietreggiden (Twitter, TikTok), & @katietreggiden3908 (YouTube) & @katietreggiden.1 (Instagram) – and if you’re a designer, maker, artist or craftsperson, join me on IG @making_design_circular_

About Katie:
Katie Treggiden is the founder and director of Making Design Circular – an international membership community and online learning platform for environmentally conscious designers, makers artists and craftspeople. She is also an author, journalist and podcaster championing a hopeful approach to environmentalism. With more than 20 years’ experience in the creative industries, she regularly contributes to publications such as The Guardian, The Observer, Crafts Magazine and Dezeen. She is currently exploring the question ‘Can craft save the world?’ through her sixth book, Broken: Mending & Repair in a Throwaway World (Ludion, 2023), this very podcast.

Below is a transcript of our conversation. Find the full episode available to listen on Spotify here.

INTRO

Welcome to season four of Making Design Circular with Katie Treggiden, in which we’re exploring what it takes to cultivate a creative practice in which you, your business and the planet ALL get to thrive. We’ll be diving deep into the nuances, complexities and mindset shifts that we need to embrace to bring about a just transition to a more circular economy.

PODCAST SNIPPET

Although any form of mending or repair could be seen as a form of activism in today’s single use culture, many of today’s artists, menders and remakers are choosing to make a statement with their work. A broken object delivers frustration because it doesn’t achieve its functionality says Paulo Goldstein, on page 122. But the same principle applies to a broken system that people profiled in repair as activism are deliberately using repair to point a finger at what is broken.

EPISODE INTRO

Hello, and welcome to episode two of season four of making design circular with Katie Treggiden. I thought I would do something a little bit different in this episode. As you may have heard me mentioned in the previous episode, my latest book, Broken: mending and repair in a throwaway world came out in April of this year, and I thought it might be really lovely just to read you the introduction and give you a flavour of the book. So here it is.

MAIN PODCAST

It’s called Introduction, a case for paying attention. And it opens with a dictionary definition of the word broken, which says broken, adjective, damaged, no longer able to work, interrupted or not continuous, or of a person having given up all hope, or despairing. And then there’s a quote from Otto van Bush, which starts with a dot, dot dot. And it says, other things can be repaired. Objects of course, traditions can be. Hope can be, emotions eventually, but it requires cautious handling, patience and care. Old hope can age beautifully.

And then we get into the introduction itself.

I’m writing this in the searing heat of July 2022. Temperatures in the UK have exceeded 40 degrees centigrade for the first time in history. Railway lines are warping, runways are melting and people across Europe are dying. I live in a county famous for its mizzle, a portmanteau of mist and drizzle. And I drove home past a wildfire this afternoon. In this moment, while I acknowledge the privilege that make these new experiences for me, I understand more clearly than ever, that our systems and structures are broken. The planet is heating up. It’s time to move away from a linear take-make-waste economy, away from the three C’s of capitalism, colonialism and consumerism, and away from the idea of human supremacy over the natural world – before it’s too late.

And yet our news cycles have been filled, not with dire warnings and calls for change. But with abandoned net zero commitments, fossil fuel companies announcing off the chart profits and puff pieces about people going to the beach to take advantage of the hot weather. Clearly, the system is working just fine. For some.

The question of who gets to decide what is broken and what gets repaired or remade is at the heart of this book. Author, activist and social justice facilitator Adrienne Maree Brown argues that our work is to notice what is broken may not the dangerous fragments of the past and let them go or remake them into something beautiful, and then begin again. First, we have to notice what is broken.

Despite the lack of mainstream coverage most of us understand that we are living in the age of the Anthropocene and its human activity is now the dominant influence on the climate. We know that we have changed natural ecosystems that have existed on Earth for millennia, in ways that can’t be reversed. We’ve lost half the world’s biodiversity in my lifetime alone, and global temperatures are close to spiralling out of control. And we know that the systems and structures that oppress and exploit the global majority are more than just unjust they are damaging but to all but the global elite. We know full well what is broken, It’s just that sometimes, often, we can’t bear to look. It’s too hurtful, too unfair, too frightening. And so we look away.

Whichever side of the political divide we fall, we probably also know that it’s not finished breaking yet. These systems of oppression will inevitably fall says Brown. The structures that are not compatible with life on earth will end. US academic Stephen Jackson agrees. Many of the stories and orders of modernity or whatever else we choose to call the past 200 odd years of Euro centred human history are in the process of coming apart. Perhaps to be replaced by new and better stories and orders, but perhaps not, he says. And it’s that perhaps not that is key, along with the question, better for whom? Because if we’re really honest, we all know that more change is coming, and we’re scared. That’s why governments seem to be swinging wildly from far left to far right. Why oil companies are hoarding profits, and why the voices of naysayers, doomsters and conspiracy theorists are getting louder and louder.

If we want new and better stories, and world orders, ones that are better for all of us, not just a tiny minority, we can’t look away any longer. We need to hold the stare with what is broken, with what can be repaired or remade, and what needs to be cleaned up and let go.

The act of noticing, of paying attention and asking questions enables us to hold space for two radically different realities. Realities that Jackson describes as a fractal world, a centrifugal world an almost always falling apart world on the one hand, and a world in a constant process of fixing and reinvention, reconfiguring and reassembling into new combinations and new possibilities on the other. He describes our broken world as a world of pain and possibility, creativity and destruction, innovation and the worst excesses of leftover habits and power, and suggests that the fulcrum of those two worlds is repair. The subtle acts of care by which order and meaning and complex socio technical systems are maintained and transformed. Human value is preserved and extended, and the complicated work of fitting to the varied circumstances of organisations, systems and lives is accomplished.

Broken world thinking asserts that break down disillusion and change rather than innovation, development or designers conventionally practised and thought about what we need to focus our attention on. Or as Mister Rogers mum puts it, look for the helpers, you will always find people who are helping. This is a book then not about designers, innovators and makers. But about menders, repairers, fixers, hackers, and re makers about those helpers, the people who can look damage and decay in the eye and construct new orders, new and better stories .

In a throwaway society in which most people choose to look away to replace rather than repair. This book will explore the social and cultural roles that mending plays. Of course, the restoration of function is one of them. But the objects featured are rarely mended solely for pragmatic reasons. There’s usually something in the original damaged piece that would be lost if it was simply replaced, not to mention the heritage craft skills involved in its restoration. There are a lot of people who love the materials and the processes, says Chris Miller in repair as restoration of function on page 47. I like to think that what we do honours and respects that. Whether it’s harking back to a simpler way of life, or a desire for things to be made with a quality that’s difficult to find in contemporary products. Restoration offers more value than replacement. It’s just that that value is not always measured in financial terms.

In repair as storytelling, we look at repair as a way to retain, retell and reimagine the stories embedded within objects. In her book craft of use Kate Fletcher critiques images of fashion garments that are unworn and crumpled, capturing the idealised moment before a person slips on a piece. Before time and life enters the sleeves marks the collar and creases the fabric at the hip of the trouser leg. And it’s these crumples, these marks and creases. the craft of use that the artists, menders and remake as you tell stories through repair are interested in the time and life that those objects have already experienced and the time and life yet to unfold. As Celia Pym says on page 57 I am often more interested in the damage than the repair. Understanding the story behind an object changes its value makes you appreciate it differently.

Although any form of mending or repair could be seen as a form of activism in today’s single use culture, many of today’s artists, menders, and re makers are choosing to make a statement with their work. A broken objects delivers frustration because it doesn’t achieve its functionalities as Paulo Goldstein, on page 122. But the same principle applies to a broken system. The people profiled in repair as activism are deliberately using repair to point a finger at what is broken at the systemic structural and cultural level of society and asking us to notice to pay attention.

While some are working to raise awareness of the impact of our broken systems, others are quietly working to repair or remake them. The curators and remakers in repair as healing are all finding ways to heal personal injuries, to reconnect people and to rebuild communities through mending and repair. I approach repair as an act of healing says Ekta Kaul on page 144. A stitch is to mend feelings of loss to process emotions, to hold on to memories and to create new connections with what I hold precious, she says.

And finally, in the last chapter regeneration is repair, we come to regeneration because as Sebastien Cox says on page 214, it’s essential that we not only try to stay sustainable, but that we actually try to repair what has been lost. It’s no longer enough to simply repair the things we’ve already taken from the earth. We also need to mend the systems we broke in the process of taking them. And the people profiled in chapter five are doing exactly that.

And so despite the context within which I write, despite the systems and structures that are, to my mind, so utterly broken, I am not. I have not given up all hope, I am not yet despairing. I work hard every day to maintain what Christiana Figueres and Tom Rivett-Carnet call stubborn optimism. One of three mindsets they recommend in their book the future we choose for combating climate change. Stubborn optimism is not blind faith or naive hope. It’s the result of doing the work of holding space for all that is broken. All that might be repaired or remade, and all that needs to be cleaned up and let go. I find hope in the work of those who mend despite all the reasons not to the parents, grandparents and caregivers who patch knees worn through children’s trousers, the shed dwellers, allotment keepers and garage owners who can always find something that might do and the 28 people profiled in this book. I hope they help you to find your way back to stubborn optimism to. To hold space for both the pain and the possibility to reconnect with old hope and find it has aged beautifully.

So that is the introduction to the book and a little hint given to each of the chapters. And some of the makers remakers, menders, fixes, hackers, curators and artists profiled if you would like to get your hands on that book so you can read the rest the link is in the show notes. Thank you so much for listening.

OUTRO

Thank you so much for listening to this episode of Making Design Circular with Katie Treggiden. It is so lovely to know that there are people out there tuning into these conversations. If you found that interesting, I would love to connect with you on Instagram, I am on @katietreggiden.1. And if you’re a designer, maker, artist or crafts person who’s interested in sustainability and environmentalism, then please also follow @making_design_circular_ and both of those are in the shownotes. You can also follow my email newsletter there. I would be super grateful if you’re listening to this on an iPhone or iPad or other Apple device if you could leave us a review on Apple podcasts. I think that’s the only podcast platform that takes reviews, but it’s incredibly helpful to help people find us and make sure that more and more people are finding this message. So if you could take a couple of moments just to leave a review there that would be amazing. And I would also like to say a quick thank you to the incredible Kirsty Spain, who produces and edits this podcast and keeps me on track so that these episodes actually make it into your ears. So thank you very much, Kirsty.