Using object intended for one purpose in alternative way
Plastic bottles (with LED lights) repurposed as a
chandelier during
Ramadan in the Muslim Quarter,
JerusalemSt William's College (
York) facade. The curved wood protrusions are probably repurposed ship frames.African music instrument made from a food can
Repurposing is the process by which an object with one
use value is transformed or redeployed as an object with an alternative use value.
Description
Repurposing is as old as
human civilization, with many contemporary scholars investigating how different societies re-appropriate the artifacts of older cultures in new and creative ways.[1] More recently, repurposing has been celebrated by 21st century hobbyists and arts-and-crafts organizations such as
Instructables and other
Maker culture communities as a means of creatively responding to the ecological and economic crises of the 21st century. Recent scholarship has attempted to relate these activities to American left- and right-
libertarianism.[2][3]
Repurposing is the use of a tool being re-channeled into being another tool, usually for a purpose unintended by the original tool-maker. Typically, repurposing is done using items usually considered to be junk, garbage, or obsolete. A good example of this would be the
Earthship style of house, that uses tires as insulating walls and bottles as glass walls. Reuse is not limited to repeated uses for the same purpose. Examples of repurposing include using tires as
boat fenders and
steel drums or plastic drums as
feeding troughs and/or composting bins.
Incinerator and power plant exhaust stack
fly-ash is used extensively as an
additive to concrete, providing increased strength. This type of reuse can sometimes make use of items which are no longer usable for their original purposes, for example using worn-out clothes as
rags.[4]
Appropriation (art) is the repurposing of pre-existing objects or images with little or no transformation applied to them. The use of appropriation has played a significant role in the history of the arts (audiovisual, literary, musical and performing arts). In the audiovisual arts, to appropriate means to properly adopt, borrow, recycle or sample aspects (or the entire form) of human-made audiovisual culture. Notable in this respect are the
Readymades of Marcel Duchamp and
sampling in
Hip Hop music.
Full-size vans from the
Big Three which have been used for airport shuttle service have been repurposed as church vans mainly because of some
depreciation to facilitate affordable cost for thrifty church groups.[5]
Electronics
A
USB dead drop can be mounted on a
brick wall since this gives an opportunity to repurpose older USB flash drives with obsolete capacities to continue service for file transfer (especially anonymous ones) that don't demand more than one
gigabyte.[6]
Everdrive and other flash video game cartridges have offered opportunities to download
ROM images of video game cartridges onto
SD cards while offering opportunities to repurpose real vintage video game consoles for retro gameplay.[7]
Old Android smartphones, which tend to have little computing resources yet which are unused and probably contain a triaxial
accelerometer of decent specifications, can be used as an amateur seismograph node for a distributed seismography project, e.g.,
Quake-Catcher Network.
Discarded or new consumer COTS surplus parabolic reflectors intended for use for C band satellite TV reception can be repurposed for a wide gamut of applications for which a consumer-grade reflector of low gain is adequate, incl. amateur microwave SETI (mainly
Project Argus), Wi-Fi links, and microwave
amateur radioradio beacons.
As a tactic for manufacturing goods
Right-hand-driveJeep brand vehicles, such as the
Jeep Wrangler, which are initially slated for import to right-hand-drive countries, have had some specially designed versions repurposed for US and Canada
postal service mail carrying, in which this tactic of repurposing can consolidate the overhead of retooling for specialty manufacturing of the vehicle.[8]
Improvised
cowbell for sheep or goats, found in 1988 near
Tuqu', the West Bank. The aluminium bell's body is probably a broken kitchen utensil, while the clapper is a brass
cartridge case (SMI 25 NATO, probably 7.62×51mm).
This pizza peel was made from oak floorboards that was salvaged from a home demolition.
Plywood door repurposed as a tall table, with door knob retained to serve as "hook" for a bag or umbrella, and wood stair steps repurposed as bench seats put on top of bar bench steel frames
See also
Wikimedia Commons has media related to
Repurposing.