Teseo — riparare invece di sostituire

The problem

Objects have weak points designed to fail, and when they do a single gear, clip or knob is enough to throw the whole thing away, because after a few years the spare part can no longer be found. A distributed network of FabLabs, makerspaces and repairers able to print that part locally already exists, but nobody sees it. The survey and interviews we ran on repair habits confirm it: people would rather repair, and what stops them is not knowing where to find the part and whom to ask.

The solution

Teseo takes its name from the ship paradox: an object's identity lies in the relationships between its parts, not in the parts, and a repaired object is still the same object even if it carries the marks of whoever put it back together. The service connects the person with a broken object, the digital files of the spare parts and the nearest 3D printer, whether a FabLab or a private owner willing to print for the neighbourhood, so that repairing becomes simpler and closer than buying.

To tell the story we designed Enactive Sky — Memoria Materiale, a 60-second show with 200 drones representing an archetypal object through its life cycle: cohesion, stress, fracture, waiting, the signal coming from the network, the layer-by-layer rebuild as in a 3D print, and finally the scar, which stays brighter than the rest as in Japanese kintsugi. Every phase is described with the swarm's parameters, from forces to colours, so that the reading is immediate with no captions.

My role

A group project with Yating Hu and coursemates. I worked on user research, on the service concept and on the design of the show, from the system feedback to the interaction storyboard.