Care and Repair through Intimacy: A Live Lab Approach in the Garden City

Participatory Design (PD) is increasingly interested in the repair process, motivated by the curiosity to articulate a more caring and relational attitude toward our socioecological environment. However, placing ‘repair’ centrally in PD is difficult, since the latter has been traditionally focused on ‘making together’ and less on repairing what was once made, or even ‘unmake’. While repair is part of our continuous activities (repairing clothes, bikes, marriages, and relationships), it is often a painful and challenging endeavor. Repair entails hope but also grief. This article discusses how we used a Live Lab to explore more intimate design approaches, opening pathways to explore plural relations and access embodied and emotional knowledge. Finally, based on our research experience in a garden city, we reflect upon how acting within an intimacy framework contributes to PD’s repair process, by bringing socioecological entanglements to the agenda of citizens.