Repair not replace. That’s the main idea behind designer Xiaodong Ma’s “Repairing Society”, a collection of design objects intended as a social critique against consumerism and our culture of fast-replacement. 
Ma’s work challenges overconsumption and rethinks the value of everyday objects we commonly consider disposable. 
The designer accompanies the work with a series of one-line statements, acting as a manifesto of sort, from “Believe that old is better than new”, to “Planned Reuse”. The work focuses on different practices of repairing and designing for objects to be broken and repurposed gracefully.

For his collection, Ma employed processes such as Kintsugi, the Japanese technique of repairing broken pottery with a porcelain paste mixed with gold, or 3D-scanning and 3D-printed plastic grafts to fix objects (such as a woven basket) that miss entire pieces. The result is a poetic call to rethink our relationship with objects and consumption along three main tenets: Repair (Broken is better than new), Graft (Recombining for Repurpose), and Autotomy (Design for broken).

The concept of grafting, in particular, is the one that creates the most interesting and unexpected objects, such as a watering cup formed by a watering neck and a broken cup or a cup-glass created by mixing the handle of a broken teapot with a broken standard IKEA glass.