PLATE: Product Lifetimes and the Environment 2017

is paper outlines the framework, development, methodologies and objectives of ‘Object erapy’, a collaborative human research project and participatory exhibition concerning the public perception of broken objects and their transformative repair, which we de ne as repair that changes an object’s appearance, function or perception. e process by which owners of broken objects were interviewed and their possessions collected for distribution to Australian and international, emerging and established artists, designers and other specialists, for response, is described. is methodology is framed as an approach of critical design that connects a community with another, mediated and traced by the researchers, for the purposes of ‘constructing publics’, a concept developed from John Dewey by Carl DiSalvo and new materialism theorist Jane Bennet. e critical design aspect in this regard corresponds to making public the problems and perception of broken objects – problems of ownership, obsolescence, and lack of options for conventional repair – within a public exhibition presenting alternative, experimental approaches to repair and reuse. e paper argues that the process of commissioning transformative repair processes thereby constructs a public and, via a new materialist approach, reframes human/non-human relations in ways that acknowledge the agency of materiality in social ecologies