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Why scaling repair is necessary right now

A growing community of fixers allows people to share ideas, hone business models, and push for legislative and corporate policies that support stewardship over waste.

Tools for repair sit on a table with a post-it that has 'right to repair' written on it.

Photo by Andre Boukreev on Shutterstock.

Fixation book cover

This is an excerpt from "Fixation: How to Have Stuff Without Breaking the Planet" by Sandra Goldmark. It is reprinted here with permission from the author. 

Scaling repair

There are lots of factors in scaling repair; legal issues such as intellectual property, access to manuals and parts, economic incentive structures and international labor patterns that make it hard to compete, and the challenges of reverse logistics. This is a critical piece of the puzzle —  we need legislation like that being championed by the Right to Repair movement, which will compel manufacturers to make their products fixable at independent shops and by consumers, not just by licensed dealers. We need international labor laws that ensure fair pay to people making stuff around the world, so that prices for new goods simply can’t be artificially cheap anymore. And, unless we start making robots for repair, which seems unlikely at this point given the variability of the tasks, we’ll need to train a workforce if we want to expand our capacity to fix things, and to bring repair and service into a circular, sustainable economy. This will involve creating systems where people can again learn, in body and mind, the necessary skills. It will also involve recalibrating (or repairing, if you will) our concept of how to scale, and what innovation looks like.

Since mending and making are so closely linked, repair fans might look to the maker movement for some ideas on how to grow. The term "maker movement" was coined in the early years of this century, and described a trend that united tech enthusiasts, artisans, and hackers who attempted to revive and modernize the tradition of individual making and tinkering. Like repair, the maker movement was characterized by diverse, artisanal, and decentralized work — and therefore faced challenges to scaling. Chris Anderson, CEO of 3D Robotics and former editor in chief of Wired, grappled with this question in his 2012 book, "Makers: The New Industrial Revolution." Anderson proposed a new form of scaling that is "both small and global. Both artisanal and innovative. Both high-tech and low-cost. Starting small but getting big. And, most of all, creating the sort of products that the world wants but doesn’t know it yet, because those products don’t fit neatly into the mass economies of the old model. The money on the table is like krill: a billion little entrepreneurial opportunities that can be discovered and exploited by smart creative people."

Anderson’s vision for an artisanal movement connected by the power of modern technology provides a template for repair, as well. The ability to crowdsource wisdom, in the form of YouTube videos or iFixit guides, can make a repair rabbit hole avoidable, or at least salvageable. The growing community of fixers, connected by such groups as Repair.org, Repair Cafés, and iFixit, allows people to share ideas, hone business models, and push for legislative and corporate policies that support stewardship over waste. And open-source knowledge and platforms can allow fixers to be local, while tapping into resources beyond their own community.

Unless we start making robots for repair, we’ll need to train a workforce if we want to expand our capacity to fix things, and to bring repair and service into a circular, sustainable economy.

One important mind-set shift is to realize that inherent challenges (smallness, master-apprentice model, individualized work) are not actually liabilities to scaling repair, but might be the solution: the seeds for a powerful new-old model. Our current economy fetishizes the new, the shiny, the high-tech miracle, and devalues anything that is not seen as "innovative." In a New York Times op‑ed titled "End the Innovation Obsession,"” David Sax challenges our very definition of innovation, and provides an antidote to the endless push for the silver bullet:

This mind-set equates innovation exclusively with invention and implies that if you just buy the new thing, voilà! You have innovated! Rearview innovations have proved to be as transformative as novel technologies. . . . They are innovative precisely because they propose a valuable community alternative solution. This type of reflective innovation requires courage, because it calls into question the assumption that newer is necessarily better. These innovations aren’t mired in the past. They are solutions firmly focused on the future — not some technocentric version of it, where we invent our way to utopia, but a human-centric future that reflects where we’ve been, what we’ve learned and how we actually want to live.

The key, however, is in the mix of old and new. You can’t forget the "rearview" part of rearview innovations. The internet can support and enhance master-apprentice learning, but it’s hard to beat being in the same room with someone you are learning from. Platforms like Handy.com or TaskRabbit can facilitate connections between fixers and customers, but there is nothing like actually knowing and trusting the people who work on your stuff. Scaling repair will need to be a hybrid: open sourced, digitally interconnected, supported by technology and policy, but also local, individual, and deeply connected to person, place, body, and hand. The type of creative problem-solvers who fuel the nascent repair movement, as well as their kindred spirits in theatres, artists’ studios, maker labs, and home workshops around the country, are the front lines as we rearview-revolutionize the way we make and mend, and what we value.

Sandra Goldmark was a guest on the GreenBiz 350 podcast. Listen to her interview here.

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