Playful Repair

Plastic was once celebrated as one of the greatest inventions of the twentieth century. Today, however, plastic products are often discarded because they are inexpensive to replace rather than repair. Living in Barcelona, I frequently encountered discarded plastic furniture on the streets. While wood has joinery, textiles have stitching, and ceramics have Kintsugi, plastic has never developed a widely recognised repair language. This became the starting point of my project. Instead of hiding damage, I wanted to celebrate it. Cracks and missing parts become traces of an object's life, expressed through colour, texture, and form. Using recycled HDPE collected from discarded bottle caps, I developed a series of repair recipes inspired by baking. Mixing colours, melting, pressing, and moulding became playful processes for creating visible repairs. For one chair missing a leg, I created five different replacement legs, each with its own recipe and fabrication method, showing that repair