Design: Reparation

One of the concepts you’ve developed concerns the recycling of digital objects and thereby ties in with repair studies. Is repair essential to the transition and does it bring about a new esthetic?

I collaborated with designer Gauthier Roussilhe on a project that aimed to capture the way the environmental crisis changes our design practices. In doing so, we paid particular attention to the environmental impacts of digital technologies and the way in which design uses our everyday material conditions to serve as a negotiating tool between the paradoxical injunctions of global and digital issues. We published an article as a result of this investigation: Nicolas Nova, and Gauthier Roussilhe, “Du low-tech numérique aux numériques situés” [From Digital Low-Tech to Situated Digital Technology], Sciences du Design, 11, no. 1 (2020): 91, https://doi.org/10.3917/sdd.011.0091.

We thus came up with the concept of “situated digital technologies” to describe low-tech digital design, which is often poorly defined. We thus conducted an investigation aiming at compiling a list of existing practices demonstrating great creativity among all sorts[Ndt1]  of players in such diverse areas as video games, website creation, and designing recycled machines or so-called “zombie media.”Technical objects that are theoretically “dead” but were brought back to life for uses that have drifted to some extent from those they were designed for. An expression coined in 2012 by two researchers in media studies—Garnet Hertz and Jussi Parikka.

It turns out that progress in terms of the digital future isn’t so much about technical performance as it is an ability to repair. I, therefore, don’t see the future of digital technologies as happening in Silicon Valley, but rather in the “invention of everyday life.” Object durability, their minimal energy impact, and resource depletion are fundamental questions for our future and imply reconsidering our standards and invite recycling, recovery, and re-use. These are, in a sense, the weak signals of a different relationship to technical objects, which could soon become widespread, aiming to preserve the habitability of the planet.

Ernesto Oroza’s artworks are a clear illustration of this idea. The Cuban artist and designer, who is head of research at the Saint-Étienne Higher School of Art and Design has focused his work on circumventing objects. We can feel that it is difficult to project oneself in a positive and utopian future world, especially when one lives in the Western world, as attested by the popularization of collapsology. In many places, however, the local populations have already been confronted with situations of social, economic, political, or environmental crisis, which they’ve overcome while continuing to imagine other ways of doing things and living together. What emerges is an “esthetic of resourcefulness.”

When we look at artistic practices, other forms of representation exist which are less stereotyped, less widely known, and a bit stranger, questioning our relationship to dirt or defilement, for example. Anthropologically, our relationship to hygiene has developed in a certain direction, but we could imagine it changing course due to environmental reasons. We could then be washing our bodies and our clothes less frequently and revise current standards defining what is “dirty” and what is “smelly.” When we engage in design fiction projects, which imagine these kinds of narratives, these are very likely viewed as forming a negative and undesirable imaginary and pushed aside. Nevertheless, to maintain the habitability of the planet, we cannot avoid engaging in a complete overhaul of our anthropological relationship to certain dimensions of the world. This is certainly not straightforward, but I remain convinced that we can reinvent our relationship to anticipation and projection as long as we walk the talk and take off the blinkers we wear in our daily life.