Last year I spent two weeks as a designer in residence in Doha, hosted by the MFA in Design program at VCUQatar. The focus of the residency was working with the idea of a "repair culture" that first occurred to me while talking to members of the Bricolabs network during Pixelache Festival 2013, in Helsinki. Of course, repairing broken things is nothing new. But it seems to become less fashionable everyday in many parts of the world. Lots of economic as well as cultural issues contribute to that, at the same time as there are significant experiences resisting the disappearing of repair.
One specific concern I had was the way people are adopting the so-called "maker culture". Back in 2009, some of us were excited with the renewed interest in making and the promises of defying industrial capitalism - proposing alternatives to its heavy environmental impact, logistic costs and the fundamental drive to alienate people from the inner workings of the products they buy and discard. Currently, though, digital fabrication technologies seem to be increasingly turning into mere tools for new sorts of commercial entrepreneurship that can instead give new breath to the industrial age.
Qatar was a meaningful context to expand those thoughts. The country's economic development in high speed exacerbates the worst implications brought about by practices of contemporary post-industrial capitalism. Most people there are able to buy things and shortly throw them away. And being a country in which recycling is hardly viable, "away" may as well mean "somewhere in the desert". Or "somewhere abroad where we can't see".leia mais >>