Patrick Pearce

Patrick is a furniture and object designer as well as a strategist whose background in communications design and film production spans a few different cities and continents.  Patrick’s MDES research at Concordia draws from these disciplines and psychogeographic explorations in creatively repurposing products, components and materials from industry sources and elsewhere. 

Patrick questions how upcycling can have wider circular economic impact. By scaling up practices beyond niche and DIY ones, upcycling has to potential to result in viable designer-maker enterprises and help to deviate industrial, institutional and post-consumer waste from landfill along the way. 

In contrast to their recycled counterparts, he sees upcycled objects as inherently storyful, reflecting at once the byzantine journeys of their constituent parts and the designer’s eye in proposing new forms, functions and interpretations. If new objects can solicit our desires and invite us to develop relationships with them, well-designed upcycled objects can be just as compelling, and offer additional narrative threads for us to unravel and tangle with.