Very often (nearly on a daily basis) my kid comes to me with some object and tells me: “Daddy, could you fix this?”. Even when I sometimes respond that something cannot be repaired, they would not let go: “everything can be repaired”. Inspired by my kid’s conviction and enthusiasm, I would like to embark on a journey to reflect and experiment on whether everything can indeed be repaired and, moreover, assess if everything is worth fixing.
The Repair Agency is a long-term platform exploring repair as a speculative, situated, and critical design practice. It operates as a modular institution—appearing in different contexts as temporary stations, one-on-one sessions, public encounters, or field experiments—always anchored in the question: What is worth salvaging, and how might we repair it? Rather than offering fixes, the Agency treats each case of breakage—whether material, social, or conceptual—as a site for shared assessment. If a repair is deemed meaningful or necessary, a provisional protocol is drafted: a specific, local model that may be adapted elsewhere. Over time, these protocols form an evolving archive of situated responses to damage, neglect, and wear. As a platform, the Agency resists extractive design cultures and the fetish of innovation. It draws from repair traditions, maintenance work, and care practices often undervalued in mainstream discourse. It is slow, modest, and portable—committed to fostering attentiveness, relationality, and accountability through the act of staying with (the trouble of) broken things.
TRA @ Madrid Design Festival 2026
The Repair Agency: Exercises in the Art of Repair
Friday, 13th February 16:30-18h
As part of the Madrid Design Festival, this first activation functions as a collective experimentation space, where participants will begin to develop a shared language, tools, and methods to think and practice repair as a contemporary design craft. The workshop will last 90 minutes, with 12 to 15 active registered participants. Each person is asked to bring “something broken”: a daily object, a technological artifact, a process, a gesture, or even a practice or relationship worthy of attention. This act is both symbolic and methodological, anchoring the conversation in concrete materials and acknowledging that repair begins with close observation.
During the session, participants will observe, analyze, share, and imagine possible interventions on the brought items. Activities are conducted collectively, recognizing that repair is also a relational practice requiring listening, negotiation, and openness. Emerging ideas may be documented as “repair protocols”: short, situated, incomplete guides that can inform future actions. Beyond immediate solutions, this repair station functions as a conversational and material laboratory: a space to pause, question, speculate, collaborate, and also to accept when something cannot—or should not—be repaired. Repair is presented as a process of ethical positioning, inviting discernment, valuing what is damaged, and deciding what deserves care and attention.
The session does not only ask “How do we repair this?”, but also “Is it worth repairing?”, “What does repair imply in this context?”, and “What knowledge, emotions, and collaborations does repair activate as a critical practice?”. This first session is an opportunity to collectively explore the boundaries and potentials of design as a reparative act.