Loes Glandorff



Transpair is transformation and repair. Itcombines hacking, anarchistic mending and creative disobedience at home.
Transpair is reuse during use, by experimenting when things break or loose their function.
Transpair is open-ended design: users and designers collaborate as co-creators on evolving interiors.
Transpair transforms consumers into active users and homes into playful laboratories.

While I was looking into reuse in design and architecture, I was inspired by how waste was transformed in all these marvellous designs. But the more I saw, the more I wondered what these designs might have replaced. What was wrong with the previous space, structure object? Did it lose its function? Couldn't that be fixed?

At the same time I realized that because reuse strategies deal with waste processing, they give the user a very limited role. In this system designers and users are cought in a monologue: designers send their products into the world and the users buy it, use it and afterwards recycle it again. There is no possibility for users to talk back to the designer. I wondered why designers do all the work for us, when there is so much fun and satisfaction in making and designing?

So I developed Transpair: a form of reuse that allows users to become co-creators of an ever evolving home.

My project
Staging Transpair is an open-source interior design experiment, in which guests - creative professionals and laymen - Transpaired my temporary home. The aim was to research how users and designers can collaborate during the period of use. The experiment shows the possibilities of Transpair and investigated how the home could become a laboratory for open-source interior design.


Using discarded and broken materials I built an apartment in a theatre. It was a laboratory in which designing, making and using happened simultaneously and during two weeks this was my home.
Guests came by to Transpair my home with whatever was at hand. Led by a fascinating object, shortcomings in the house, or a need from me as the inhabitant, creative (non)professionals made a home out of a decor. I was there to steer the process and give a hand with ideas, questions and expertise.
A live-stream and blog kept track of the developments. On the final day there was an expo and a sale of the created objects. The results of the experiment can be found at www.transpair.org.


My essay

I see interior design as a starting point for users to live in. Designers tend to forget that Interiors are static and perfect on pictures only. Real life is constantly evolving and interior design should have that as its center point.

In my essay I write about Hacktivism as described by Otto von Busch. Hacktivism is a form of creative resistance: not by rejecting a system, but by actively building on it, creating alternatives that can transform it from within. He approaches fashion as a tool to empower individuals, and by making open-source interventions he wishes to slowly change the top-down system of the fashion industry.
I looked at Hacktivism in architecture and design. Through examples of Platform21, Rex architects and 2012Architecten I try to find an approach that fills in the blanks in the period of use. Strategies that empower users from consumers into co-creators.

I connect this to the acts of hacking and dynamic reapir as described by Richard Sennett, and merge this into Transpair: my alternative for current reuse practices. In the final chapter I describe Staging Transpair. I describe my findings and try to formulate how Transpair could be used as a tool to transform the home into a laboratory for interior design.