Francis Cheung

Given the free return policy, the notorious Return Culture has become the norm of online shopping. Roughly 30% of items are returned for various reasons - half of them get back to the suppliers, while the other half are sent to the landfill owing to the immature reverse logistics.

The Re-fulfilment Centre is proposed to address the bottleneck of returns. Through this centre, retailers could get rid of unwanted returns with a partial compensation; while the local communities could take advantage of the ample return inventory to create something useful and meaningful. It is a new form of charity shopping, taking the shape of a more comprehensive in-house mechanism - from capturing returned goods, to upcycling them in the communal workshop, and to reselling rejuvenated items at the local market.

This is a Theatre of Return Products - a building entirely colonised by objects. The shelf-walls are not only the functional space to store objects, but also the shear walls that effectively support the slabs in the terrace layout, a specific arrangement that has made reference to the Theatre of Memory imagined by Guilio Camillo, a 16th century Italian philosopher.

As a symbiotic association with the e-commerce environment, I believe it could slowly reform the status quo of the distorted shopping culture, almost like the anti-Food Waste app Too Good to Go. Hopefully, the Return Industry could be recognised as a reverse of online consumption where people break away from excess consumerism and come together as a community of making - a Re-fulfilment Centre that is truly fulfilling. As after all, this is a project that challenges the “bizarre normal” of shopping culture, in pursuit of changing practices & collective engagement.