For the academic year of 2025/2026, In4Art was appointed as academic coordinator of the LDE Thesis Lab “Future of Repair,” to support the research on repair culture. LDE Thesis Lab is a joint initiative of Leiden, Delft, and Erasmus Universities bringing together master’s students whose graduation research focuses on concrete repair challenges. To do so, In4Art shaped the backbone of the lab, based on the work coming from our 30-minute Repair Society. This led to designing circular safaris to sites where repair culture is being actively built or challenged, facilitating peer-to-peer sessions in which students exchanged findings and stress-tested each other’s assumptions, and guiding them toward developing their own outcomes.
The through-line was a single provocation: take the non-human perspective. Rather than analysing repair from the outside, students were asked to embody the products themselves: to reflect on the repair ecosystem from within it, and to investigate how people care for, neglect, and relate to the things they own. This article shows what that process produced.
Taking the Product’s Perspective
This format was chosen to build empathy with material objects, reveal hidden complexities, and generate unexpected insights into the repair system, without framing it through the specific viewpoint of producer, retailer, or consumer.
To support this, a series of five enrichment sessions was organised: design for repair (Decathlon, Tilburg), economy and history (Remake Society, Rotterdam), legal frameworks (Provincie Zuid-Holland, Den Haag), logistics and infrastructure (PostNL Innovatielab, Den Haag), and behaviour change and consumer campaigns (Stunt, Delft). Each session paired a site visit with practitioners and researchers and was accompanied with peer-to-peer exchanges, giving students space to interrogate what they had heard against each other’s emerging perspectives, before carrying those insights back into their product embodiment.
Together, these sessions gave insights into various repair conditions: design, economic, legal, logistical, and behavioural, under which repair functions or fails, and let them challenge and stress-test their own assumptions about responsibility and circularity within the product’s “body.”
Repair is as much about relationships & stewardship as it is about cost or convenience.
Still speaking from inside their products, students went on to debated how laws and regulations shape product behaviour, and how people care for and relate to the things they own. They were challenged to identify a “no-brainer” intervention for their specific product, a small design or policy change with outsized impact on repairability (think of the universal USB). This generated insights into tools, design requirements, and ways to stimulate maintenance awareness. The selected products were deliberately those used regularly, where failure creates instant urgency for repair: a winter jacket, a smartphone, a bicycle, and a coffee machine.
These insights fed into a prototype app, RECARE, conceived as one place that holds together the different pathways a product’s repair can take: its “healing journey”. After diagnosing the product and its specific failure, the user is offered three distinct routes: Bond with Your Product (a DIY path, with tutorials, tools, and an automatically compiled parts checklist), Find Your Repair Match (a social, swipe-based path connecting users to nearby community repairers, ranked by experience), and Spa Day for Your Repair (a drop-off path, mapping the choice between a free, volunteer-run repair café and a paid, certified professional workshop). It values layered and fair access, stewardship and repair-as-relationship. The app highlights a specific repair need a single user can act on today; transitioning to a repair society comes with one (self) repaired broken item at a time.
Underlying this design is a conviction that repair only becomes a genuine alternative to replacement once it is as accessible, low-friction, and dignified as buying new. Offering a self-help route, a peer/community route, and a professional route side by side acknowledges that no single channel can carry the full weight of a repair culture; people repair when the right path is close at hand, visible, and matched to what they are actually capable of or willing to do at that moment. In this sense, the decision of how to repair is never a dead end.
Repair as Stewardship
By embodying the product itself rather than any one stakeholder in the chain, the students’ approach also surfaces something easy to lose in policy or business-model discussions of repair: that an object carries its own history of use and care, and that the choice to repair it is as much about relationship and stewardship as it is about cost or convenience. RECARE’s tagline, “Care about your things, they’ve cared for you,” captures this directly: repair becomes not an isolated technical fix, but something owed back to the object for the use it has already given. Read this way, the app’s three pathways are an invitation to make repair visible again: shifting it from something solved quietly and individually behind closed doors, to a practice that is shared, witnessed, and valued, whether through a tutorial followed alone, a match made with a neighbour, or a drop-off at a local repair café or repair professional.
