studio method's repair cart asks what design can do for communities

arrotino del design shifts attention toward local repair

During Milan Design Week, installations often appear as polished objects briefly dropped into the city before disappearing again. Studio Method proposes something slower, smaller, and far more embedded in everyday life. Their project, Arrotino del Design, takes inspiration from the long-standing Italian figure of the traveling repairman, the arrotino, a familiar figure who once moved through neighborhoods fixing household objects while becoming part of the neighborhood life. ‘Basically, it was this repairman who goes around the neighborhood and fixes things, and he’s very much embedded in the community,’ the designers Riel Bessai and Pedro Daniel Pantaleone explain. ‘That’s why we took this figure as a starting point.’

Developed during Nieuwe Instituut‘s CIVICITY residency program, the project grows out of Studio Method’s time spent in Quartiere Adriano, a peripheral neighborhood in Milan. There, the duo quickly realized the area did not need designers to arrive with grand solutions. Instead, they encountered already existing systems of care, social bonds, and collective activity operating through community centers, local organizations, and informal networks.

‘The question wasn’t really what can we go there and do,’ they reflect, ‘but more what can we learn from these neighbourhoods already, and what can we bring back?’

Arrotino del Design by Studio Method | image by Lorenzo Bondavalli

from design brief to ‘micro-brief’

This shift in perspective became the foundation for Arrotino del Design. Studio Method began rethinking the design brief itself, without the ultimate goal of producing a singular object or installation. The duo critiques the conventional exhibition format of design week, where projects are often detached from their surroundings and displayed inside interchangeable white-box spaces. ‘Normally you arrive with a product, you show it, and then you leave,’ they explain. ‘It could be in Milan or another city, it doesn’t matter. It’s disconnected from the place.’

Against this model, Studio Method developed the idea of the ‘micro-brief’, small, highly localized requests emerging directly from residents’ daily lives. The mobile cart, attached to a hacked Lime scooter, travels through Milan collecting these requests while functioning simultaneously as workshop, meeting point, and repair station.

‘What if designers worked through really specific local problems’ Studio Method asks. ‘How can we work together to solve these little issues in the neighborhood?’

Some of these micro-briefs are practical. During the residency, the designers rebuilt broken folding tables for the local elderly center, where residents gather for dances and community events. Elsewhere, damaged tiles became part of a structural intervention, while a broken pipe was transformed into a planter. The gestures are intentionally modest. Yet, their importance lies precisely in this refusal of spectacle and focus on attention to maintenance, repair, and collective care instead of proposing another monumental vision for the city.

‘We started shifting attention away from these big grand ideas, towards specific issues’ the duo highlights, ‘Maybe thinking smaller is actually a way to think bigger.’

the mobile cart is attached to a hacked Lime scooter | image by Lorenzo Bondavalli

building trust instead of solutions

One of the most significant challenges of the project involved resisting what the designers describe as the ‘saviour reflex’ embedded within contemporary design culture. Studio Method spent time allowing relationships and exchanges to develop naturally and avoided approaching residents with ready-made answers. ‘The good thing about the residency was that we had enough time,’ they explain. ‘It didn’t feel like we were trying to sell something.’

This slower process transformed the project into an evolving platform for exchange. Residents began approaching the designers organically, sometimes asking for practical repairs, other times becoming curious about fabrication tools, digital modeling, or reuse strategies. One resident even offered lunch in exchange for help, establishing a reciprocal dynamic that became central to the philosophy of the project. ‘We tried to make something happen and then have people approach us,’ the designers say. ‘We wanted to create a platform where these things could emerge naturally.’

Repair often became the entry point for broader conversations around creativity and authorship. ‘People would say, okay, you do repairs, fix my glasses,’ they recall. ‘And we’d do it. But then we started asking ourselves, at what point does repair become design?’

For Studio Method, the answer lies in the moment creativity, improvisation, and agency enter the process. Their interventions move beyond restoration and towards transforming discarded or damaged materials into opportunities for experimentation and collective learning.

functioning simultaneously as workshop, meeting point, and repair station | image by Lorenzo Bondavalli

counter-balancing design weeks

Throughout the residency, the duo repeatedly encountered a shared exhaustion surrounding Milan Design Week itself. Residents often felt disconnected from the event taking place around them, while designers expressed fatigue with its commercial intensity and repetitive cycles of production.

Instead of positioning itself entirely against Design Week, Arrotino del Design attempts to counterbalance it. The project introduces another rhythm into the city, centered around conviviality, participation, and continuity rather than visibility and consumption. Importantly, the project still continues after the end of the design week. The cart will remain connected to the Magnete community center in Adriano, continuing its role as an active neighborhood tool rather than becoming another temporary installation archived after the fair.

Studio Method describes the residency as a reversal in perspective, asking what residents can contribute to design itself. Arrotino del Design proposes a softer understanding of practice, rooted in listening, exchange, and shared acts of repair.

draing from the long-standing Italian figure of the traveling repairman | image by Lorenzo Bondavalli