R3pair Volume

<p>Like all collaborative endeavors, bringing together an edited collection is about fixing as much as gathering the insights and details (and yes, flaws and limits) of individually or jointly conceived pieces to bring about a larger conversational whole – a drawing forth, or drawing together, of scattered threads and pieces into something considerably messier than a quilt. All the more so when the collection is the result of a generative collaboration, bringing guest editors Lara Houston, Daniela K. Rosner, Steven J. Jackson in conversation with the <em>continent.</em> collective to present this special issue “R3pair Volume”. The conversation of course runs deeper and longer than the 17+ months of engagement among the contributors here. For the last 5, 10, 20 or 100 years (pick your starting point!), a motley and heterogeneous band of thinkers from Europe, North America, and the world have grown suspicious of the stories we tell about objects as stable and therefore rather settled things (whose drama, if any, inheres only at moments of design); and the way these stories render invisible a whole range of human relationships with and to objects that turn out to be central to sustaining the worlds around us, however provisional.</p> <p>This is not to question the value of design (and we wish to recognize here the beautiful work of Nina Jäger, the gifted designer who helped give shape and life to the visual form of the pieces herein) but rather its primacy – or more simply, the presumption that most or all that is interesting and worth caring about in objects is accomplished at the moment of design. If that were the presumption, the pieces here beg to differ. They inhabit forms of difference in situations of technology production: ordering development practices anew and offering alternative metaphors of fulfillment and care, complete with their knots, complexities, and breakdowns. They address how we organize to sustain technologies across time, charting formations of labor that catalyze around recuperating social and material order. They also explore what happens when we let go of these ties – whether through acts of abrupt severance or slow forgetting – revealing the negotiated limits of repair and its aftermath. In short, this collection affirms there is life beyond design – a welcome thought to those of us who have always found Silicon Valley rather problematic in its universal approach to material production. But it also suggests that we are always already living this possibility, even if our stories so often work to obscure it…</p>