  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.
