Subhadra's Puzzle

Subhadra is an educator at the Blue Gum Community School in Canberra, the puzzle’s home for the past 10 years. Puzzles are notoriously difficult and expensive to produce. Too often when pieces go missing they are considered useless and are thrown away – a child’s sense of achievement is diminished when a puzzle can’t be completed. Subhadra has been challenging this notion, asking the children, aged three to five, how they can continue to use the puzzle despite it missing several parts. When deciding to submit the puzzle to Object Therapy, there were many ideas from the children. Perhaps the puzzle could be turned into a coat, or its own world. Or maybe the puzzle could be turned into a new game without the confines of the frame.

In repairing the object, Daniel and Emma leapt directly from this line of thought. They removed the puzzle from the frame and transformed it into a memory game titled ‘Memory Memory’. They refurbished the pieces, making them look new again, an approach that is a commentary on why we buy things for that 'new' feeling.

Design Repairers: Daniel Emma

Adelaide based Daniel To and Emma Aiston established the design studio Daniel Emma in 2008, to enable them to express their thoughts through industrial design. The studio works on a large variety of projects, ranging from desk objects to installations. Daniel Emma look to create the unexpected from simple objects using simple forms, drawing influence and insight from the diverse culture that Australia presents us with. Their designs aim to be ‘just nice’.

Explore Object Therapy here

Subhadra's Puzzle. Repaired by Daniel Emma. Photos by Lee Grant. Image copyright Hotel Hotel.