‘Repair is our future, but unlearning the habits of a lifetime is hard’

This month, I have a lot riding on a puffin. The puffin in question is a painted beechwood bird, created by the Danish designer and silversmith Kay Bojesen in 1954 as a toy for children or, I suppose, an ornament for adults who like puffins. That’s the design story anyway. If you’d like to get a little more personal, my puffin is named Graham Secrets and he was my 30th birthday present from my parents. A few weeks after I received Graham, my cat thumped him off a shelf and snapped his wing. In a bid to hide the damage from my family, I ordered a do-it-yourself kintsugi kit (superglue and gold glitter) and attempted a repair. The glue sadly stripped the lacquer from Graham’s wing, while the glitter ended up smeared across his belly as if he’d fallen prey to King Midas’ wandering hands. I hate what I did to Graham. In his hour of need, I took his dignity from him.

Pictured above: Graham Secrets, Oil Stratford's beloved puffin. Photo: Zuketa Film Production

Yet all is not lost. Graham is currently undergoing a resurrection as part of R for Repair, a London Design Festival exhibition curated by Hans Tan and Jane Withers, and organised by the Design Singapore Council, the National Design Centre (Singapore) and the V&A (17 September – 30 October 2022). It’s a programme in which broken objects have been submitted by people from across the design industry (and by the general public) to undergo creative repair at the hands of designers and craftspeople in the UK and Singapore. The exhibition’s organisers see it as an initiative that highlights the value of repair, suggesting a future in which we escape throwaway culture and embrace restoring objects. I see it as a way to make things up to a puffin I’ve wronged.

Since June, Graham has been in the hands of Ng Si Ying, a Singapore-based UX designer who is also an expert in rattan weaving. I have no idea what Si Ying is doing to revive Graham: a central tenet of R for Repair is the importance of surrendering a degree of control over our objects. We need to accept, the argument runs, that change is a natural part of an object's lifespan, while unexpected alterations can be a source of delight and meaning, adding layers of richness to our possessions – qualities that have been stripped away from many products through mass production, consumption and marketing. I don’t believe my puffin could be in better hands: Si Ying’s rattan work is exquisite and, when I told her Graham’s story, she completely understood. She also has a cat who I suspect may have obliterated their own fair share of possessions.

This is not purely a personal story. In its wider politics, R for Repair chimes with a number of recent initiatives: Eternally Yours – Care Repair & Healing (2022) at Somerset House in London and YOYI! Care, Repair, Heal (2022-23) at Berlin’s Gropius Bau are both design and craft shows that praise repair as a means of reducing waste, redressing throwaway culture, and building emotional bonds between communities, makers and objects. Even outside of dedicated exhibitions, repair practitioners such as Celia Pym are increasingly seeing their work championed by major institutions. In its break with consumerism, repair seems to represent a future in which care, consideration and respect become paramount, replacing our current attitudes of wastefulness and shallowness.

One reason that I wanted to participate in R for Repair is because, like many people, I’m not very good at fixing things or even just living with repaired objects. Ever since childhood, I’ve lusted after the new and pristine – and even if we agree with the politics of repair, many of us remain easily seduced by the promise of newness. While the ‘right to repair’ movement may be a critical darling, its actual practice is far from widespread and the infrastructure and product design principles that would enable its wider adoption remain largely absent.

Repair remains niche: unlearning the habits of a lifetime is hard, commerce bites deep, and what may feel exciting within a critical design exhibition can be difficult to execute in everyday life. When Graham was broken, it felt like he was spoilt. When I attempted to repair him, I didn’t feel like a progressive maker at the vanguard of contemporary design practice; I felt like a man with a broken toy puffin, basting him in glitter I’d ordered off Amazon.

But I am at least trying to be better, because repair is so patently our future – or at least it should be. So why not break myself in with a repair carried out by an expert? A master rattan weaver like Si Ying will create something far beyond any store-bought ornament, and I’m excited to welcome Graham #2 back home at the close of R for Repair (I hope he’ll have forgiven me by then).

But one puffin does not a movement make. The real test will be as to whether the example this will set me can seep into my wider behaviour. I’m already ordering my DIY rattan kit in anticipation, ready to patch up any sections in Si Ying’s work that may fall into disrepair. And should rattan weaving prove too ambitious, I have plenty of glue left over to have another stab at kintsugi.