DESIGNING TO ENABLE REPAIR
Introduction
“ The old order changeth, yielding place to new. ” These lines from Tennyson’s famous poem Idylls Of The King (1896) appropriately summarize the transformational nature of everyday products. Artifacts that are made with even the utmost care and thought eventually break, degrade or become outdated and defunct. This evolutionary pace and ecological balance are disrupted when products are purposely designed with shorter lifespans to favor greater economic benefits. Rosner and Ames describe this practice as “planned obsolescence: the manner in which a product is built to last for only a few years rather than a lifetime, and meant to be replaced, not repaired” (2014, p. 319). They state that within IT production, planned obsolescence is a defined parameter for design (2014, p. 319). This factor, coupled with Moore’s law which Simonite explained as, “the feedstock of exuberant innovation in computational power” (2016, para. 2), is responsible for the attitude of disposability towards commodities like computers, electronics, and consumer appliances.
Heating devices like toasters with their frail, but cheap to produce, resistive heating element are a classic example of an appliance designed for a short lifespan (Rosner & Ames, 2014, p. 319). The recent releases of Apple iPhones and MacBook laptops that come with difficult-to-replace fused retina displays and bonded batteries are a testament to the planned obsolescence built into our devices. More and more products are being designed to be “sealed boxes” that can neither be opened nor fixed, and end up in a landfill sooner than later.
Fortunately, there are signs of a cultural shift towards sustainability. While current ideologies primarily center on reduce, reuse, and recycle, the built-in obsolescence renders product longevity through repair all but impossible. Conversations and initiatives that address this situation would be more beneficial when they originate during the conception of the product itself. An intervention in the planning stage of design, centered on building repairability into our devices, is a small but nonetheless important first step towards a sustainable future.
This paper starts by examining the current relationship between design and the practice of repair. It examines how they inform and affect each other. In the second part, the focus shifts to the reason behind this argument. Repair plays a crucial role in the pursuit of ecological sustainability. The act of fixing things can both prolong the life of an artifact, and create new values through the process of engagement for its users (Chapman, 2015). The claim that consideration for repair in the design process of products can prolong the life cycle of these objects is substantiated by a few examples that put this ideology into practice. The products in these examples have been designed with at least some consideration of the failures that arise from everyday use and the subsequent repairs required to extend their life. The final part of this paper explores ways in which designers can ensure that the things they design are repairable and supplemented with the information required to carry out repair.
The relationship between repair and design
Numerous design and human-computer interaction researchers have addressed the relationship between repair and design. Maestri and Wakkary researched repair as a creative process that gives multiple lives to every day designed objects (2011). Artists have approached the work of repair as creative repurposing (Jackson & Kang, 2014, p.456). Rosner and Taylor examined the practice of repair and restoration in bookbinding as a resource to inform design (2011). Practices of technology repair in Bangladesh were surveyed as a source of knowledge and learning (Ahmed, Jackson & Rifat, 2015, p. 905). Values and the socio-economic factors behind repair systems were researched in Uganda (Houston et al., 2016 ) and India (Rangaswamy & Nair, 2010). A similar study by Jackson et al. (2016) contrasts the nature and variability of repair as a socio-technical activity amidst cultural and infrastructural difference.
They attempt to understand the practice of design when deterioration and breakdown, rather than innovation, evolution, and prosperity, are taken as a starting point. Drawing from the repository of explorations that survey repair and design, this paper takes the opportunity to examine why designing to enable repair as a means to increase product longevity could significantly contribute to the overall goal of achieving ecological sustainability.
Derrick Mead outlined the relationship between repair and design as follows: Repair is a design constraint and an outcome of product design. It’s also a practical activity performed — or not — on designed objects. Similar skills and understanding are required to design and fix things well, but these shared capacities are applied to very different practical ends. Both agents, the designer, and the repairer seek to solve similar problems, but from opposing starting points, with different goals and limitations. Holistic, empathic thinking is key from either vantage; empathy for the user as well as the object is vital. (2012)
While Mead beautifully captures and illustrates the dynamics of repair and design, the association is not always linear, where repair follows design (or doesn’t). Kintsugi, a traditional Japanese art where broken pottery is fixed with a special lacquer dusted with powdered gold or silver, allows for innovation in design through a repair. Kintsugi is heavily influenced by the philosophical idea of celebrating the unique history of each artifact. The idea behind repair is the Japanese value of mottainai, which conveys a sense of regret when something is wasted (My Modern Met Team, 2017).
While product design is performed mostly by trained practitioners, repair, apart from the exception of certified repair facilities, is mostly undertaken by regular people. The lack of requisite skills or the know-how to repair an object makes the task unapproachable for most people. The prohibitive cost of repair is another factor that makes it inaccessible or unfavorable for many. Designed products are mostly mass produced which helps in offsetting the cost of production and makes it cheaper to buy new things. Repair, on another hand, is usually a small-scale operation that needs to be competitively priced for economic feasibility. In other circumstances, products are not designed to be disassembled for repair for reasons varying from aesthetics, safety or for monetary profits from replacement (Lockton, 2013).
Why building the ease of repairability in products is so important
Tim Cooper, a prominent researcher in the field of sustainable design argues that it is difficult to shift from a linear economy to a circular economy and achieve a sustainable consumption index until industrialized nations figure a way to curb the amount of household waste that they generate. Cooper notes that the short lifespan of products is partly accountable for the wasteful culture of these nations (2013, p. 51). Building easy reparability into the design of products and fixing and maintaining these products could be an effective solution to increase the durability of products which would, in turn, increase the timescale of consumption. A decrease in the trips to the landfill would not only reduce stress on the limited resources that earth has but also provide to the environment a much required time to heal and replenish.
Moreover, the act of repair not only increases the longevity of a product by making it functional again, it also lengthens the duration for which the user keeps the product by altering the relationship between the two.
Houston et. al in their paper Values in Design noted: Generic manufactured objects may be deepened or ennobled through repair, adding effective and social valences. Within an industrial and consumption-centered economy, new forms of durability can be achieved, and things meant to be discarded can be turned into things to be cared for and saved. At the same time, repair can change its human participants, transforming ‘mere users’ into something slightly more, better versed and engaged with the object worlds around them. In short, repair may support ongoing forms of valuation that continue to unfold through the lifetime of our objects, reshaping values and meanings ‘originally’ made durable through design. (2016, para. 5)
In their book Sustainable Everyday, Manzini and Jegou explain that to achieve a sustainable ecosystem we need to transition together towards a regenerative society.
Manzini and Jegou proposed:
From a society where the normal condition is growth in production and consumption, we must move towards a society able to develop while both reducing them and restoring quality to the physical and social environment.
This must be a regenerative society and economy, where the creativity and enterprise of its members, its technological potential, and the organizational capability of business can all become agents of sustainability capable of improving the quality of our world. (2003, p. 30)
There are unique and noteworthy forms of learnings, collaboration (Jackson, Ahmed & Rifat, 2014) and socioeconomic and sociocultural infrastructures (Rosner & Ames, 2014) around the practice of repair. This distributes the responsibility for understanding and creating a sustainable environment from just one stakeholder — the designer — to everyone involved in an interaction with the designed object.
A transitioning attitude towards repair
Over the last decade, policy-making has started taking center stage at both local and global levels. The Right to Repair Bill, a recent legislative reform, makes it mandatory for automobile manufacturers to provide to its consumer the same repair instructions as they do to their dealerships (Rosner & Ames, 2014). Kyle Wiens, the CEO of teardown company iFixit and an advocate of the Right to Repair bill, stated that “Making repairs difficult leaves consumers with one choice: Replacement. And that invariably means the busted device ends up in a landfill, or a recycler” (2017, para.11). The increase in the longevity of devices could have a huge environmental impact.
Right to Repair seeks to moderate the ability for consumers to disassemble, fix, and customize the products they purchase (as cited in Statt, 2017). A citizen-led movement that advocates repair over replacement is gaining momentum. Pop-up Repair Café s and Fixit Clinics that promote a culture of repair are trending all over North America and Europe. People come together at these meeting places to share expertise and tool libraries. These events are designed to help the locals repair as well as learn to fix their broken products (Rosner, 2014).
The center of Craft, Creativity, and Design in 2016 held an exhibition titled The Future of Fixing where it featured design studios and artists whose work addressed the concept of repair, through various modes and means. The description of the exhibition read, “The future needs a new relationship with making. A forward-thinking, backward-looking, sideways-stepping kind of making. A making born of the imaginative use of skills. Something like fixing” (n.d.). With the aid of these examples, the paper attempts to lay emphasis on a rising movement, a new wave of consciousness that is building into society towards repair, and sustainable living. The progression may be slow and unglamorous but it would be foolish of designers not to use this opportunity to at least attempt to build repairability into the design of their products.
Pioneers that design with the intent to repair
A great example of built-in repairability is the flagship product by European brand and social enterprise Fairphone, which uses modularity as a primary feature of its phone to enable repairability. The smartphone is designed with longevity in mind and can be easily repaired and upgraded. Where most new phones are notorious for being glued together which makes them impossible to fix, the Fairphone handset can be deconstructed in minutes (Vincent, 2016). All the major components are accessible and removable using just a small screwdriver. In the event that a part breaks down or needs a technological upgrade, consumers can buy small, individual parts from the company rather than replacing the whole set with a new model. The well-designed accessibility that makes this device easily repairable is a reflection of the considerations for repair that its designers took into account during the initial planning of the product.
“All you need to take apart the Fairphone 2 and its major components is a small Philips screwdriver” (Vincent, 2016).
Fairphone founder, Bas van Abel, claims that people take pride in owning a Fairphone because its company ethics and values are in the right place. He states that millennials are more thoughtful about their impact on the environment and want to be a part of something that serves a bigger purpose (as cited in Lomas, 2017). He points out to a changing trend — sensitivity to environmental issues — in consumer buying decisions, a development that more brands and products should take advantage of.
Projects like the Repairable Flatpack Toaster and The Optimist Toaster by the Agency of Design in the U.K. are great examples of products built with repairability in mind. The Repairable Flatpack Toaster uses flatpack assembly and repair as a strategy for designing sustainable electronic appliances in an effort to reduce e-waste (Hou, 2017). The Optimist Toaster is made of heavy cast aluminum. It is fitted with a manually operated odometer and has side-mounted doors that enable the toaster to function with minimal movement. In the event of a breakdown, the toaster is fairly simple to disassemble and repair with components available at local hardware stores. The toaster is a great example of a product designed concurrently with the system in which it exists and its eventual need for repair (Mead, 2015).
In the fashion industry, brands like Patagonia are already consciously designing their products with durability and performance in mind to ensure their longevity (Hendriksz, 2016). Designers at Patagonia surveyed the reasons that were primarily responsible for the shortened life cycle of their merchandise. They discovered that small rips and tears, and broken zips were the most common culprits. To address the issue they designed clothes with more durable zips that were also easy-to-replace when necessary. In addition, they designed sew-on patches to encourage their consumers to embrace the rips and tears in their clothes as memories and created a campaign around it to make repair fashionable and socially acceptable. The brand not only provides free in-store repair facilities, it also offers patches, repair kits, care guidelines and eco-friendly stain remover tips to ensure that their merchandise lasts a long time. Patagonia strives to create a culture around repair and encourages its customers to follow online repair instructions and mend themselves. Rick Ridgeway, Vice President of Public Engagement for Patagonia noted during his speech at the Copenhagen Fashion Summit, “As the usable lifetime of our products increases, the lifetime environmental footprint decreases” (as cited in Hendriksz, 2016).
In fact, the rising number of companies that offer free repairs on their products or offer repair kits for consumers indicates a growing sensitivity towards product longevity in both brands and consumers. The popularity of DIY videos online (Rosner & Bean, 2009) are a testament to the fact that people like to and are capable of making and mending things when clear instructions are provided. More companies should follow in the footsteps of these brands which make repair instructions and manuals available online. Giving well-designed manuals and tools to consumers can empower them to make small repairs themselves, thereby cutting down the support costs and mitigating some of the economic constraints that make repair unviable.
According to IFIXIT.org, a wiki-based tech website that encourages people to repair their products by publishing repair manuals and video online, 95% of its community members are more likely to buy products from a brand that they have successfully repaired before. Repair offers a lucrative proposition to brands by cultivating brand loyalty, promoting customer retention, and reducing support infrastructure-related overheads.
Where might the designer begin?
“A true success often works precisely because its designers thought first about failure. Indeed, one simple definition of success might be the obviation of failure” (Petroski, 2012). To create a truly sustainable product, designers need to analyze the damage, erosion, and deterioration that accompany its intended use. They need to make considerations for subsequent repairs in the initial design development stage. In addition, well-designed instructions could empower users to take on simple fixing and mending on their own. These coupled with the ongoing transition in society towards issues related to sustainability could help to counter the throwaway culture that plagues the world. Though not exhaustive, listed here are a few questions that designers might ask themselves while making considerations for repair in the development stage of design:
● What is the breakdown that could result from the intended use of this product?
● Which other factors could lead to the breakdown of this product?
● In case of a breakdown, is the product easy to disassemble and reassemble?
● Are there components of the product that might fail sooner than others?
● Are the parts susceptible to damage easily accessible and removable?
● Are the parts that might require replacement easily available?
● Is it possible to design components that need replacement over a period of use to be cost-effective?
● Can alternative technology and materials be explored to achieve more durable components?
Scripting repair ahead of its time is not easy to accomplish and nor is it completely foolproof. Designing for repairability might not be enough to address the issues around sustainability. The reasons behind why people choose to repair (or not) are numerous; the issues around requisite skills, economic viability, and safety concerns will continue to persist. However, by ensuring repairability, a designer at least creates the option to repair. Then the consumer can no longer use the built-in obsolescence of a product as an excuse not to repair. By simply enabling the repairability of an object, the designer makes the user an active stakeholder in taking responsibility for the future and related sustainability practices of the product.
Derrick Mead, in Designing for Repair: things can be fixed stated the following: Overcoming the ‘optionalness’ of repair that contemporary mass-consumer culture presents us with is not effortless, but it is achievable. Even though we might not all be equipped, either with the skills or the tools, to take on fixing our own belongings, choosing to have them fixed for us instead of throwing them away can have powerful implications: repair can represent an easy ‘lifestyle’ choice to make. (2012)
The solution proposed in this paper might not be the ultimate solution to the problems of overconsumption and the throwaway culture that challenges society today. However, Rosner and Ames (2014) encourage others not to abandon efforts to design to enable repair despite the discouraging outcome of their own project. They believe breakdown and repair are integral parts of technology use and will become more important in the future when resources become more difficult to come by.
Jonathan Chapman, during a presentation, remarked that in order to effectively address the issues around sustainability what the world needs is “not mass-answers but a mass-of-answers” (J. Chapman, personal communication, October 13, 2017). The proposition made in this paper is just one of the many solutions to the overwhelming wicked problems that confront mankind.
This paper approaches the vast issue of sustainability from the standpoint of repair and product design. It advocates that understanding breakdown and designing for subsequent repair should be integral to the design criteria that a designer lays down before a product is developed. The inclusion of this step could benefit the longevity of products and contribute to the overall goal of a sustainable future. Moreover, making considerations to repair early in the design process can help designers find creative ways of building repair enabled products. Even the examples mentioned in this paper approach the issue in different ways. Fairphone uses modularity in its design to enable repairability. On the other hand, Patagonia through a well-designed brand strategy has cultivated a culture where repair is considered cool and acceptable, something to take pride in. The easy accessibility to repair via its repair shops and mobile repair stations ensures that people have a simpler choice to make when it comes to repairing stuff over discarding them. The social and commercial success of Patagonia ( Sirtori-Cortina, 2017) is evidence that when artifacts are designed with the right motivations, people are more open to change and often demonstrate a transition in behavioral patterns while making sustainability-related lifestyle choices. The abundance and popularity of online tutorials suggest that people are willing to learn, grow, try new things and undertake hands-on activities. The act of repair creates a system with multiple stakeholders, inadvertently transforming them into agents of change in the creation of a sustainable future. Apace with the transitioning consumption culture, conveniently repairable products coupled with easy-to-follow instructions present a viable proposition to address the issues of overconsumption and product longevity.
“The future is undoubtedly open and unpredictable, but the present contains the premises for any possible future: however tomorrow unfolds, it will be built on what is produced today” (Manzini & Jegou, 2003, p.16). If more products are designed today with the intent to repair, they could be fixed tomorrow, albeit some more easily than others. A simple design consideration towards repair has the potential to make a significant difference to the way people interact with the object world and the environment around them. Well-designed instructions and materials can empower people to undertake repair themselves, value their things more and save it for a little longer. Every product that gets a second life and doesn’t end up in a landfill paves a way to a possible future — a sustainable future.
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