ShaRepair Practices

Co-Creating Sustainable Urban Living

How can we co-create sharing and repairing practices, so they become embed into people’s daily lives? How can designers create products and services that support new sharing and repairing practices? These are core questions the NWO KIC project ShaRepair Practices aims to answer, in collaboration with municipalities, businesses, NGOs, and universities.

ShaRepair Practices seeks to make sharing and repairing a natural part of urban life, focusing on consumer goods like electronics, furniture, and clothing. Despite their potential to drive a circular economy, these practices remain underutilized in the Netherlands, with limited participation and scaling across communities.

Using Social Practice Theory, the project examines how sharing and repairing practices are shaped by meanings, skills, and material conditions, and relate to broader social, political, and institutional contexts.

Through a Living Lab approach, we engage a diverse set of stakeholders—academics, industry leaders, and community members—to co-create, test, and scale sharing and repairing practices. Our goal is to fill critical knowledge gaps, overcome participation barriers, and avoid unintended outcomes like rebound effects, where efforts to reduce waste end up increasing consumption.

Design researchers at TU Delft are focusing on scaling circular practices to reach groups not yet strongly involved in the circular economy. Using co-creation methods, they will explore how these practices can be adapted and scaled in three specific contexts: workplaces, neighborhoods, and community groups such as sports clubs and develop products and services that support new practices.