TOKYO — As odd as it is to see an exquisite 17th-century Japanese bowl in a contemporary design exhibition, it seems odder still to discover that it is there not because of the finesse with which it was originally made, but the skill with which it was repaired during the late 1800s.

Tsukuroi, or the art of repair, is so revered in Japan that it is believed to create a new form of beauty, as the bowl demonstrates. In “The Fab Mind: Hints of the Future in a Shifting World,” an exhibition here, the bowl acts as a prelude to a display of work by the Fixperts. This international network of contemporary designers and makers experiments with recently developed digital tools and ancient craft techniques to customize new objects and repair damaged ones, just as the artisan who fixed the broken bowl did so deftly over a century ago.

The Fixperts are among several dozen design groups from different countries whose efforts to devise ingenious solutions to social, economic and environmental problems are explored in the show, which runs through Feb. 1 at the 21_21 Design Sight gallery, founded by the Japanese fashion designer Issey Miyake.

Image Alvaro Catalán de Ocón lamps in the “Fab Mind” exhibition. Credit... Alice Rawsthorn

Organized by the curators Noriko Kawakami and Ikko Yokoyama, the exhibition presents a polemical vision of design’s impact on our lives at a turbulent, often menacing time. It focuses on the new wave of design activists, who treat design as a means of pursuing political objectives or as a medium for research, rather than as a commercial discipline. They are able to do so thanks to the technological advances that have made it possible for them to operate independently — by exchanging ideas on knowledge-sharing platforms, financing projects through crowdfunding campaigns, testing inexpensive digital production systems (like 3-D printing) and raising awareness of their work via social media. (The “Fab” in the title alludes to the “fabulous” ingenuity of their experiments with new forms of fabrication, according to the curators.) Typical is the Fixperts network, which was founded in 2012 by the British designers James Carrigan and Daniel Charny to encourage designers to work together to solve problems and to share the results on its online platform. It has since staged dozens of workshops at design schools, museums and festivals in cities around the world.