Perhaps the most remarkable thing about the all-purpose repair material Sugru — a hand-mouldable, durable silicone elastomer that cures in air at room temperature — is that the idea came not from a materials scientist or engineer but from a design student, Jane Ní Dhulchaointigh, a postgraduate at London's Royal College of Art. Rather than filling the world with more stuff, however beautifully designed, she felt there was more benefit in a means of extending and modifying the use of those that already exist. Sugru became first a cottage industry and then, once included in the top inventions of 2010 by Time magazine, a product with a cult following worldwide.

Naturally, Sugru could not have been developed without the assistance of materials scientists. Ní Dhulchaointigh was helped by two retired scientists who had previously worked on silicones for Dow Corning. The team experimented for seven years to develop a material with the required properties such as adhesion, setting time and plasticity.

Unlike many adhesives and fillers, a repair made with Sugru is highly visible — the material's bright colours are chosen to ensure that. The point is not to hide repair as an unfortunate or inconvenient necessity, but to advertise it as a virtue.

The common preference to keep mending as invisible as possible doubtless stems from a long tradition of regarding repair with suspicion: if this object has already needed mending once, how long before it fails again? That has probably contributed to a downgrading of maintenance skills: as David Edgerton points out in The Shock of the Old1, a clear hierarchy has evolved with the professional engineer on top and the lowly repair worker below, which does not necessarily reflect their relative abilities.

The reason why repair should be seen as aesthetically unpleasing is even less clear. Until rather recently, most artefacts (from cars to clothes) got repaired many times, so that was just how things looked. Sometimes mending acquired its own artistry: in repairing Japanese ceramics, the aim was “to use the injury as the central element for the metamorphosis of the damaged ceramic into an object imbued with new characteristics”2 — some joins were a lacework of gold.

Credit: PHILIP BALL

In materials science repair is becoming modish again, but with workshop and artisan replaced by material autonomy: the substances, whether polymers, ceramics or metals, heal themselves3,4. Much of the impetus for this research is bio-inspired, not least because none of us would be here but for the self-repairing capability of our tissues. There's plenty in nature to aspire to, such as the possibility that self-repair not only makes good the damage but reinforces against its recurrence.

Yet the case of Sugru illustrates not only that there is value still in low-tech solutions (or high-tech ones that anyone can use), but also that we might want to think more positively about repair: not as an embarrassing problem to be fixed quietly and out of sight, but as an opportunity and an objective that, in an age of material economies, can be celebrated.