Repurposing of Resources: from Everyday Problem Solving through to Crisis Management

TL;DR

This paper explores the concept of resource repurposing across various domains, highlighting its importance in everyday life, crisis management, and professional settings, and discusses the potential for formal modeling and AI support.

Contribution

It identifies key principles and challenges of repurposing, proposing a foundation for formal theories and AI methods to enhance resource reallocation and innovation.

Findings

Repurposing occurs in everyday, crisis, and professional contexts.

Challenges include modeling substitution and exploitation processes.

Potential for AI tools using commonsense and ontological reasoning.

Abstract

The human ability to repurpose objects and processes is universal, but it is not a well-understood aspect of human intelligence. Repurposing arises in everyday situations such as finding substitutes for missing ingredients when cooking, or for unavailable tools when doing DIY. It also arises in critical, unprecedented situations needing crisis management. After natural disasters and during wartime, people must repurpose the materials and processes available to make shelter, distribute food, etc. Repurposing is equally important in professional life (e.g. clinicians often repurpose medicines off-license) and in addressing societal challenges (e.g. finding new roles for waste products,). Despite the importance of repurposing, the topic has received little academic attention. By considering examples from a variety of domains such as every-day activities, drug repurposing and natural disasters, we identify some principle characteristics of the process and describe some technical challenges that would be involved in modelling and simulating it. We consider cases of both substitution, i.e. finding an alternative for a missing resource, and exploitation, i.e. identifying a new role for an existing resource. We argue that these ideas could be developed into general formal theory of repurposing, and that this could then lead to the development of AI methods based on commonsense reasoning, argumentation, ontological reasoning, and various machine learning methods, to develop tools to support repurposing in practice.