hi all my name is gay gordon byrne and
i'm the executive director of the repair
association
i'd like to welcome you to our
discussion series about fixing for
change
we are featuring three new books being
released this month that focus on repair
a quick intro about our authors and then
we'll get started
sandra goldmark is the author of
fixation how to have stuff without
breaking the planet
sandra is a theatrical designer and an
associate professor
in the theater department at barnard
she's also the director of campus
sustainability and climate action
in barnard in her spare time she
also started a repair collaboration
called a fix up
so for seven years she's been working on
fix up events
all over new york city where volunteers
have fixed
all sorts of stuff ranging from lamps
and chairs
to stuffed lobsters and i'm assured
these were toys and not real lobsters
and in the process diverted tens of
thousands of pounds of waste
john wackman and elizabeth knight
co-authored repair revolution
how fixers are transforming our
throwaway culture
john is the driving force behind what is
grown to be more than 30 repair cafes
in the hudson valley if you know the
area you'll know that it's pretty rural
and it's not a big population center so
this is an amazing
absolutely amazing community event
john says he was able to leverage his
experience in television
to bring people of diverse backgrounds
together in pursuit of a common goal he
has certainly
done so his sense of importance of
repair in building community is also
very compelling lee vinsel and andy
russell
co-wrote the innovation delusion how our
obsession with the new has disrupted the
work that matters most
i really get that new is very disruptive
and not always good
lee is an assistant professor of science
and technology
and society at virginia tech andrew is
also a professor he's a history
professor
and dean of the college of arts and
sciences at suny polytechnic
they collaborated on this book to fight
back against the notion
that innovators are heroes of our time
when much of their stuff
doesn't work at all without repair and
maintenance
i agree entirely with them that
repairing things is heroic
not only saving the item but fighting
against entropy
things break and we need to be able to
fix them
welcome kyle wiens our moderator of our
panel
on design making better stuff kyle will
be speaking with sandra goldmark
john wackman and lee vincel thanks gay i
am uh so excited to be here i have been
having an absolute blast over the last
few weeks i got my hand on these books
and so i've been really enjoying reading
them
uh i'm gonna start with sandra's book uh
because it's right here in front of me
um so the act of writing a book is
uh you you have to dive into a topic and
and go so far into it and and you end up
you can almost turn yourself into an
academic whether you're one to begin
with or not
uh by going so deep into something but i
love how you've sort of brought this
back and kind of distilled it and so
i've got here on page 12 you compare
having stuff uh
to michael poland's uh food uh sort of
manifesto and you say i propose that we
adapt this wisdom for our belongings
have good stuff not too much
mostly proclaimed care for it pass it on
so sandra walk walk me through like how
did you get to that sort of simple
distillation
because and that basically is the thesis
for the book right
yeah the whole book is organized around
those five steps
um and i guess i got there feeling like
which i think many people have had this
feeling of sometimes being a little
overwhelmed right like
you could be overwhelmed by the legos on
your kid's floor as they
like drive through your flesh you could
be overwhelmed with the problem of
climate change of feeling like what
could i possibly do and
how could i you know it can all feel
quite big
and in fact stuff is big it's a huge
part of who we are as individuals as a
species
but i also think and this is where i
really leaned on michael pollan whose
work is so amazing in the area of food
he argues that there are some simple
touchstones that we can hold on to as
we're thinking about food
and i thought this is great this totally
applies to stuff as well
um we can think about have good stuff
like
where our stuff comes from who makes it
the quality of it
not too much how much are we taking in
are we bringing in like these empty
stuff calories like empty food
um mostly reclaimed care for it that's
all of us because we're all fixers
and pass it on and so i was trying to do
both it's complex it's big but it's also
not
well and and i love how it kind of
frames it i mean a lot of
the discussion around around stuff and
repair as well we'll fix things to save
the planet well what does that do for me
i mean at an abstract level yeah i want
to leave a legacy for my kids but really
i want to leave a healthy wholesome
happy life
and so kind of by framing it around
around benefits to
individuals where we can so do what's
best for us
and then also it happens to be better
for society
that's true with michael pollan's work
and i think you lay other pretty
compelling case
in your book all right so our next uh
panelist uh is lee so lee has uh
the the innovation delusion and um this
is a little bit more of a historical
and and societal look at why
uh we spend so much time talking about
new things and not talking about what is
already out in the world
uh and at some level if you think about
like the world is big and complex
already
the things that we already have uh you
could spend the whole lifetime going
through the world and learning about all
the systems and places that we have
and yet the majority of news is talking
about things that uh either don't exist
yet or are not broadly
uh put out there yet uh and and we you
spend a lot of time
talking about roads and i think roads
are a wonderful sort of metaphor for
everything else because
i it's interesting in my local city
council uh like if they do all the
surveys and what everybody wants they
keep saying we want the roads to be
maintained better
but then when it comes time for for
policy makers to actually spend money on
things like let's build a new water
treatment plant let's like start on new
projects and not work on maintaining
what we've already got
so what brought you to this path and can
you can you tell
explain to us why roads are such a
challenge yeah i mean i really liked
where sandra started there with like
connecting it to the personal
because i think we're there's a kind of
we're kind of a split mindset when it
comes to things like roads right on the
one hand we want
we want good roads and yet we don't want
to pay for
the the cost of them we don't want to be
taxed
um so i think that that you know what a
big theme of our book is just
the lack of long-term thinking in our
culture
and there's a bunch of incentives and
structures you know we can think like
social scientists think in terms of
social structures
that push us towards the short term
whether it's just in terms of like
consumerism
and having credit cards and wanting to
like buy stuff and
not dealing with the costs like now or
it's on the level of government
and you know politicians being
um you know it's easy for them to gain
credit for
building new stuff it's very hard for
them to gain credit for things just
going well
right and i think if we look at
organizations and
other things too we see the same kind of
structures there's a bunch of things
pushing us to to kind of act on the
short term rather than think long
term
and that there's something hardwired
into how we biologically function right
that always drives us to be looking for
and talking about the new
i i work in the world of technology news
where we wanted to have this
conversation around repair
and we couldn't figure out how to have
it because it wouldn't break through
there was always a new product launch
and so the only way we were able to make
it work was by hijacking the product
launch
uh process right and we do our tear
downs well tear downs are merely a way
to game
that psychology and get people thinking
long term when
when something new comes out one of the
funny things though that we've found in
our shops and i know john found this too
was that
actually like we totally have that
impulse for the shiny new it's human as
you said kyle
right we love that how could we not but
also we actually also have an impulse
an attachment to like the boring and the
old
and that's as saying that's what our
society and what our structures
doesn't support in any way i think we
know it's cultural
so for many cultures around the world
for most of human history
actually didn't privilege the new in
this way
and when we think about like short-term
decision-making
so like you know putting off a pleasure
now
for something down the road other
cultures like
like south korea for instance are more
likely to put off a pleasure for that
down
down road payment than americans are so
i mean i think
i don't think we want to kind of like
turn it into an essence of humanness to
like
focus on the shiny because i think it
allows us to kind of
um just like dismiss how much of it is
about
kind of the way we've been reared and
the culture we live in
well and so one key way that we can
catalyze culture change
is is by is by uh focusing on our
community and the people around us
and i can i can talk on the internet all
i want it is not going to have as much
of an
impact as getting together in a room uh
with with people
that are like-minded or people that are
just working on solving a joint problem
together
so john is uh the author
of um uh of the repair revolution
at where he he lays this lays out the
history and sort of the trajectory of
where we've gotten with the right to
repair movement
but also spends a lot of time providing
practical advice for people that want to
run fix-it clinics or repair cafes
in their town so john welcome very
excited to have you and
i'd love to hear kind of your personal
journey how did you get involved
with repair cafes well
you know i i grew up
liking to work with tools and uh so
woodworking is my skill set
and and so this you know led me to
projects upon projects as as i you know
matured and grew through my life but i
reached a point where
um the
you know the uh kind of the the allure
of being with people and you know i'm
i guess i would say i've been a
community builder all my life that's
something that has
interested me how do you create
community
and in fact bringing people together
around fixing stuff has turned out to be
a very alluring thing you know there is
something that is
you know something about troubleshooting
that to many people is an irresistible
proposition
and when you sit down to you know to
take the cover off of something and get
inside of something
and look at how the stitches are made
how the fabric is blended you know these
are all things that just
drive our curiosity it's you know it's
this curiosity about the way things work
when you do that in a community setting
i have really come to believe that
repairing
in community is powerful and that a
fixed thing is a beautiful thing
and that these are you know these
impulses to repair
are everywhere in our lives they are in
our
you know in our homes uh they are in our
communities
uh they are in our you know our larger
ecological system so
how do we get you know human economy
to be closer to ecological economy
it is uh it is something that i
see in the bonds that
and we call them you know are the folks
that gather together in a community
to repair stuff their repair coaches
because that indicates this you know
interchange of information
you know these repair events are not
drop-offs and that's
very important to say right they are you
bring your item and you sit down
with the person who's going to give it
their attention
and these things are are are just
uh you know you you every item comes
with a story
uh every item has meaning
and so what do you do you sit down and
you tell the story when does it sound
absolutely supposed to be well the best
way to learn something is to sit down
with someone and have them show you how
to do it and then you
copy them right and that that
interchange that interplay
of uh right information and context
that that so the essence of humanity i
think that that then becomes the kernel
of how we can start to bring people
along this journey
and so i can imagine almost if you think
about a sequence of like
how do we go from someone who doesn't
care about about this issue or
or know much about stuff how we bring
them into our ecosystem
i before they read any of these books i
would want like go to a repair cafe
bring something broken
go hang out with john get that
experience
and then maybe read sandra's book where
she's talking about
sort of the the emotional connection
with our objects and then as
you as you dive more into it you want to
like look at the macro scale of what are
we doing with society
that's where lee's book i think comes in
very nicely
so i i want to just kind of have a bit
of a personal conversation maybe maybe
this can be a conversation but my first
question i want to hear this from all
you what is the last thing that you
fixed
in my basement uh you know here it is
we're turning
in the northeast where you know we've
summer is behind us
fall is in is is here and winter is
coming on strong
so uh right we we uh we coil up our
garden hoses
and we go into the basement and we
turn off the spigot that feeds the
outside faucet
well uh in the act of doing this mine
started to
leak seriously i mean we're talking
about a gallon a minute was starting to
come
come out of that so that was a you know
a quick call to the friend of mine who
really knows what he's
talking about uh and so basically it was
what would you say this is triage
having to stop that leak and you know
then it's really a matter of
finding you know going to the hardware
store
finding the part that i can use to
replace it
so that was you know that's home repair
so much of our repairs are at home
i mean you know lee when you when we
talk about maintenance
uh that is you know this whole
everything involved in home ownership
and maintaining
your home how you know what
what section of our economy is really
not quantitatively tracked in just
home repairs it's huge yeah
sandra how about you what'd you fix i'm
sitting right in front of it
so it's the table i'm at um it's like a
farmy i think it's like kind of a fake
farm rustic table and it had like a huge
gouge in it so every time people sitting
where i'm sitting now would put their
water glass down
basically it would like tip over it was
super annoying this like little
you know break in the table was causing
a lot of havoc so we filled it with wood
putty and sanded it
um it actually took forever to dry
because it was a lot of wood putty
um and then finally it dried and this is
where i got so excited because i one of
my
favorite um like things to do is paint
matching and staining and color matching
it's because of my theater background i
love scenic painting so i matched the
paint um a lot of people do visible
mending but i guess because
you know again theater is about artifice
i love a good invisible mend as well
yeah i have another basement story so we
have um
when we first moved into this house it's
a log cabin up on the side of a mountain
the basement was very kind of dank
and had a you know kind of moldy smell
to it or whatever
and so we and put in one of these you
know fairly inexpensive dehumidifiers
uh that runs to the um to uh the bath
the the um shower stall
in the basement and just takes you know
water out of the air
well it just kind of stopped working one
day and it turned out that it was the
hose was blocked up
and when it does that it kicks over to
the um
you know to the first the bucket in it
that and then it just stops working all
together
so it was a very simple fix of just
washing out the hose but
it felt rewarding you know i think this
is something we can all relate to i mean
when we started our community repair
events you know i thought
well to to fix most things you need a
part you know right
repair requires parts but in fact what
what
i learned very soon is that
when something stops working the way it
should it's because a connection
has been lost and that may be mechanical
electrical
electronic digital uh and they have you
know again
fabric and textiles a connection has
been lost and the fix
is is uh reestablishing that connection
finding it putting it back together and
in so many cases the fix is simply
cleaning
yeah reestablishing the connection is a
very beautiful phrasing and
i was sitting here thinking like half
the time we're just taking gunk out of
something
that's not as eloquent well
i'll give you the the opposite so mine
there was too much connection
my repair last night my my windows
laptop
was starting to every time it invoked
the video card it was blue screen
and i opened it up and it turned out a
fan a screw had come loose from the fan
and was rattling around loose in the
case
and so i removed the screw put it back
together computer works fine
so it was jumping and connecting what
year is your your laptop because i know
like
mac laptops are so unrepairable but i
know you use like an older
uh one yeah so we have an ethical
standard
and i fix it you know we have our repair
score from one to ten ten is most
uh fixable one is very hard to fix we
won't buy laptops for our staff
they're under a five so uh for apple the
last
laptop that apple made that meets that
requirement was in 2012 so i'm talking
to you right now on the 2012 macbook pro
uh it's been upgraded to 16 gigs of ram
i've got a two terabyte ssd in it like
i've upgraded it's a great machine it
still works perfectly well
that's such a great policy i've been
trying to work to get a refurbished
computer and we can't do it because of
the contract we have
do you know what i mean like we
literally can't buy a refurbished
computer and
that's exactly these are things that
we're working on we can have a whole
nother conversation about
about purchasing procurement standards
and
right we spend a lot of time working on
that and e-peat is the is the green
standard for electronics purchasing so
we
we will go down that rabbit rabbit hole
over here the conference sometime
i wanted to to dive in a little bit more
to
the things that that we so that have in
our homes and one of the the challenges
that i think that that most people face
around repair when i ask most
people we've done surveys of the
american populace and said well
you know that last thing that broke why
didn't you fix it overwhelmingly people
say
and particularly women will say i have
no idea where to start
um and and one of the ideas that i have
that sort of underpins this
is that there is one we we have embarked
on this journey of specialization
everyone in society is highly
specialized right
uh you're not just a lawyer you're an
intellectual property lawyer you're a
contract lawyer right so
uh the extreme specialization of
disciplines but that is also married
with the specialization of things in our
lives right so you look at your kitchen
and you say how many different
appliances do we have
and your blender is different from your
food processor right
and and so then you have the question is
the person who fixes a blender the same
person that fixes a food processor the
same person that fixes
a washing machine and so i'm
curious so that each year take on this
kind of macro
trend toward many different things in
our homes many different things in their
lives
where we might say well grandpa used to
fix things but i don't we don't fix
things anymore
well grandpa knew how to fix a lot fewer
things than you may but as a percentage
of the things that he owned it was much
greater right
your john's woodworking skills went a
lot farther 50 years ago than they do
today
so sandra maybe maybe lead us off
because you have experience in in
theater where you have so many different
gizmos how do we reconcile
wanting to repair with with sort of the
the increasing fragmentation of the
number of things that we have to learn
that's a really interesting question and
i think well to to the
people answering your survey i would say
just try because it's already broken you
really can't go wrong
um and of course they're you know
it's an interesting question of this and
i think it goes to some of this question
of overwhelm that people feel just like
overwhelmed by the multiplicity of stuff
and the complexity of it and the feeling
that they can't handle it
um and accidentally one of the things
that we did in our repair shops was
actually address that question of
specialization because even in the
act of repair of trying to find somebody
to fix your whatever it is
historically it was specialized right
there was a jeweler a cobbler
uh appliance guy um whatever
so in our shops we would bring all these
theater people so we were specialized we
each had our skill sets but we were all
in the same space it's kind of like a
repair cafe
and people could come in and bring
almost any object and you could
literally sense the relief
the relief in them when they would come
in with their like you know
toaster and they'd look around and
they'd be like oh you can do a lamp and
a necklace and a
and a bowl as well and they would go
home
and get their other stuff and bring it
in a bag
and so in a way i wonder if it's just a
question of like
i agree with you i think there's like
way more complexity than there needs to
be
like you really i don't think you need a
different a separate machine to do all
these different things in the kitchen
but at the same time maybe there are
some clever ways that we can structure
it for people to make it easier for them
and to reduce that feeling of like
i can't handle it you know our parallel
movement in the uk
is the restart project and you know in
conversation with
with them there they are always talking
about gadgets
all the gadgets right a restart project
is is similar to a repair cafe but they
do tend to focus more on the technology
side of our lives absolutely i know that
they are broadening that out they're
making a concerted
uh you know uh goal of broadening that
out they they want to work with textiles
they really do i'm wondering if you all
know the
the um this
factoid and that is that eighty percent
of the environmental
impact of the things that we buy is
determined at the design stage
that is to me an astonishing
but also when you think about it makes
entirely
you know entirely good sense right well
we're disconnected with where things
come from and that's something
that's something that i want to uh talk
more about but lee i'm curious your
perspective on
specialization i think i'm of two minds
about this so
on the one hand andy and i i think kind
of celebrate
specialization and complexity and so
when i talk to you
gay and nathan you know like leaders of
the right to repair movement i often
focus as much on the small business
argument
as like the repairing our own stuff
argument like
i would be happy to have local repair
shops right where i could take things
because
realistically i don't have time to
become like fix
all the things in my life necessarily
but that ability to go to local repair
shops i think is really important
um so that's a conservative argument i
like how that appeal
i wrote a piece about for the american
conservative on this very issue right
right
and on the other hand you know i've
talked to peter mui
about like you know his philosophy on
this stuff and he almost
and by the way peter runs the the fix-it
clinics which is a uh
mostly west coast west coast of
massachusetts group of repair cafe style
events
yeah and you know sandra like this with
you know the way she writes about
religion in her book but
i almost think peter like describes it
like a conversion experience like he
wants people to open things up because
of like
the aha moment they have where they
realize they can do that they're no
longer alienated from their stuff
to at least open it up and check it out
and i think that's really important
like us walking around being alienated
from our things is not
not a good it's so true and like we're
talking about design here in this
conversation a little bit but also
there's just making which isn't
necessarily the same thing
and it's interesting like we make so
little or so
so many americans today make so little
of
like what is in your home even us who
are supposedly into repair and all this
stuff if you look around what percentage
of the things around us did we make
and so in some ways maybe repair is a
way to get you that
that physical connection that physical
relationship with an object when you
open it that aha moment
oh yes there's been an awful lot written
about you know the tactile experience
and and how important it is to be
able to work with your hands yeah and
kyle i want you know i think this fits
with i fix it a lot too you know because
i
i feel like part of the computerization
of our world is
our you know relating to like screen
land or something right and not
like not having any kind of tactile
relationship
with all the electronic gadgets around
us and i think that puts
us in a kind of different um
relationship to things
whereas i think you your whole
philosophy and what you've been up to
for so long is like saying like no this
is stuff too
you can get your fingers in there right
like uh you know dive in
um doable well and for a while there was
a
design trend in user interfaces called
skeuomorphism where they were trying to
make
the interface on the device look like a
physical object so you'd open ibooks and
it would look like a bookshelf
and like all design trends it came and
went
and we're on to flat design and other
paradigms now uh
so you know all of this of course we're
kind of we're all looking at this at a
thousand-foot
picture but what do you think is there
anything that you've seen that's
inspired you
uh um or maybe maybe an anecdote you
shared in the book about
uh a way that we're getting sort of
mainstream people
involved and caring more for their
things than they necessarily were even a
few years ago
and i i have i have anecdotes from your
books that i can pull out but
i want you to kind of share your stories
i mean john you're you're closest to
people in these events like do you see
do you see growth where you see some of
the things that we like to highlight
uh is is the fact that um
people who come to our
events and and i you know i should say
there's nothing proprietary about
getting a group of people together in a
town to fix stuff and
and so there are yes there are repair
cafes and there are fix-it clinics and
there are mended maidens and
i recently became aware of a group in
chicago that is the
community glue workshop and they're
doing exactly the same thing
and and yet so what you do is you invite
people
to bring items that they care about that
have meaning to them
and or that they simply find useful and
when they bring it in that's that is the
common denominator we've all got broken
stuff
but in fact what it one of the things
that it highlights is
is our commonality and so that
things that we may disagree on in
another setting
are are you know in the background and
so what you have in front of you
is the most important thing and this is
a really
strong way to create community
uh it's it's more effective than any
other way that i have seen
well and you're starting with a problem
that's identified you bring
the toaster in it doesn't work and you
do work together and at the end you have
clear progress right you know that you
you accomplished a task and so bringing
people together and like accomplishing
something that is objectively good
particularly in these
sort of fraught political times where we
might disagree about truth
from you know one side of the street to
the other well the toaster did not work
and now it works we all agree about that
right there's objectivity there at least
there's absolutely objective well but
objectivity and social sense we're
bringing people together so i think
that's that's really inspiring
to treat community building as a form of
healing right because in order to bring
to heal and knit the divisions and
society back together
we're going to have to come together as
humans and reconcile our differences and
and so providing a safe context where we
can come together and work on something
apolitical
where we are making joint progress
together uh and
and both of us come out ahead right
because we've got this relationship that
we've built
we've got a thing that works better
that's really exciting yeah we talk
about this as the signal
that people receive when they walk into
a repair event and here's how we
describe it that signal says
we are better off when we see our own
community
in the midst of cooperation creativity
and downright decency
in a place where goals are achieved and
positive outcomes are realized
yeah that just focus on on positivity
and right we're rolling back entropy
we're doing it together
that's that's brilliant yeah i mean a
initiative that we write about um and
i've i hope to write more about
here that um is that has a similar value
is the floyd initiative for safe housing
so here in like rural virginia um
something it's actually a problem
everywhere including in cities but
critical home repair
is a real problem and the definition of
critical home repair is basically
repairs that have to happen unless you
know if the house is going to remain
livable or apartment's going to remain
reliable
and so because for complicated
regulatory and legal reasons it's hard
to get state money to do this repair
work
in people's homes with contractors this
community group has just come together
the floyd initiative for safe housing
and just like you know they pick
projects and they just go and like get
people together and they just go
fix people's houses you know and it
could be roofs that are collapsing on
people it could be floors that are
rotting out from underneath them
especially in like
uh you know um mobile homes so i mean i
think that
that is a kind of wonderful vibe and you
know shows the kind of
volunteerism that this stuff takes right
now you know i would love i can talk
about legal changes that we could
you know have to get to get to a better
road but for now i mean i think this is
what it takes well you think about uh
let's say so you can go down the home uh
depot and you can buy a new toilet uh
what portion of americans are going to
install a toilet themselves
right it's under five percent it might
be one percent i don't know right most
people are gonna hire a plumber they're
gonna hire a contractor
uh and yet uh home depot is a billion
dollar corporation selling toilets to
consumers
in every town in america right so with
that this whole ecos and oh by the way
if the plumber's having trouble getting
getting apart from his wholesaler he'll
go down to home depot and get there so
we need an ecosystem around repair it's
not it's not an
ore it's an and when we first started i
fix it we got some pushback from the
repair shops
and very quickly they realized that they
were learning as much from ifixit as
they were
sort of losing to diyers going and doing
it themselves and and uh we i haven't
heard that argument in years so
i think we we all will say that ifixit
has changed that ecosystem of repair
there's no question about it
well we are trying very hard to be you
know as comprehensive as we possibly can
by the way something you may not know
about ifixit we have power tool repair
on ifixit now so we've added over 20 000
power tool schematics in the last
few months so the next time you're
looking i bet you'll find your your
the part number that you need including
chainsaws and everything uh absolutely
we've got chainsaws we've got trenchers
we've got power drills you name it you
know
one thing that we should mention is is
tool libraries
because tool libraries are so important
in this
and and in fact you know from my
observation
it's millennials it's 20 somethings 30
somethings that are starting the tool
libraries and
you know one simple explanation is you
know us
it costs money to be able to buy this
stuff
and you need a bigger place to be able
to store this stuff so
if you can just check it out and use it
for what
you know for those few minutes you need
it that is
such a benefit and and and the community
of those people
and the learning opportunities it's all
there
well and if it's an efficiency argument
too ultimately for me i mean
so many of our tools just sit around um
not being used for most of their lives
right
and you know so all the energy
and that goes into making those tools
when we could you know have
central kind of repositories for them um
at least the big things that we don't
use very often
who needs to own that nobody needs
to own that
well in your book you do a wonderful job
of talking about sort of the aesthetics
around
uh loaning and passing some of that on
to things really well
you know libraries have been librarians
have been tremendous champions of
community repair
because you know it's programming that
they love it's intergenerational it's
hands-on learning
all the things that librarians love and
you know there's this tremendous
movement
which they they have been calling the
you know 21st century libraries
and so many libraries in fact
they they do you can check out almost
anything
you know from badminton sets to um
american girl dolls
and well maybe this is something that
that we as a group should be doing is
reaching out to librarians more
and training them because i absolutely i
mean maybe every library in the country
they are the original circular economy
if you think about it you think about it
right and that and at least in our
region here in the hudson valley that is
happening yeah and there's still lending
libraries all over the place they're
they're fantastic
they have challenges of maintenance as
well you have tools on uh accelerated
duty cycles uh and and so you have to be
able to have someone there that can work
on them so
uh i'm all ears i wanna um shift
conversation a little bit to talk about
product design
uh first uh let's just have a little bit
of fun i want each of you to shame an
object
so so tell me something that you've seen
lately that you don't particularly like
and i will start my least favorite
object in the whole world right now is
the apple airpods
which have a integrated battery and
they're disposable after 18 months
and i use every opportunity i possibly
can to talk about how the designers who
created them hate you and all the rest
of us where do we
start here
so okay so we fixed like about 2 500
objects in our seven years of these
pop-ups and 15
of those were what we called repair
fails of that 15
a vast majority of the fails were due to
either
parts unavailable broken plastic piece
um or literally like impossible to open
without shattering or ruining the whole
thing
so i'm going to sort of go back in my
catalog with someone else
like a keurig is in the category of
something that you can't snap
open without breaking all the tabs it's
designed to snap
closed and then never open ever again
i'll pick as my favorite object
or my least favorite object one of the
original iconic things that broke in my
house seven years ago
that we um we cho we couldn't fix
and uh sort of spark the whole thing
because it's a lamp like you think of
the poor design for electronics and you
think of it for things like keurig
but this lamp it had all of those
characteristics like
buried in this seemingly innocuous
object so it has a hinge point
right the hinge point is made of a
plastic piece which is obviously taking
stress
bad idea at that point where the hint so
the plastic thing broke
and you can't even get the part out
because it's riveted in instead of
screwed
so it's just very annoying lamp
speaking of rivets so speaking of rivets
uh
to steal the mic back for a moment we we
buy uh we go on
when we're trying to figure out what to
uh uh add to i fix it
we go on amazon we go on walmart we take
their top 20 uh
selling lists particularly at christmas
but we're looking all year long and then
we buy the top 20 items and then we'll
write repair manuals for them
and we do this category after category
so we'll go through and we'll pick the
top 20 lamps and then we'll write repair
manuals for those
the single category that completely
defied us and we failed and we sent them
all back
was baby strollers
they are all riveted together and then
we got some strollers and some scooters
there's also a lot of little plastic
parts under stress in those puppies
often so we just we just gave up and we
said we're not going to write service
manuals or something where we have to
drill out every single
rivet and replace it with the bolt
before you can do anything
um so if you're if you're looking for it
for an infrastructure look to see are
they are they bolts or
uh are they rivets lee how about you um
if you remember the juicero i saw
there's like a new juicero for like
cocktails now um so i think that's just
shameful
you should be making your own no drm
bandwagon but um
but actually you know um partly inspired
by conversations with you and nathan and
gay
um i um i've given up apple
altogether and i've got until they kind
of change their
um policies i i won't um
i just won't buy apple products anymore
um just because they're so unrepairable
and it seems like such an ethos
at that company to make kind of
unrepairable stuff as well as
as lockdown repair so that's a big shame
that's not like one product
and there are exceptions i know yeah
well the folks at apple don't want to be
perceived that way they
they have a lot of pride in themselves
as being the best product designers in
the world and some of the best of some
systems thinking in the world and their
iphone repair ecosystem for certain
things if you go into an apple store is
pretty good
yeah but uh in many other respects they
they let us down
right like is if repairability is a
factor in saying if something's well
designed or not
it changes the equation well if you talk
with apple folks actually i saw their
response to a retro repair story
yesterday they said
we designed it not to break oh come on
but i'll get that just
that's a fantasy that is a fantasy
there's this thing called entropy and uh
it's real
if you want to talk about objectivity
all right so i want to uh
wind things up a little bit by asking a
positive anecdote and maybe you could
tell me about a product or a company
that you think
is uh has done a good job and then maybe
if there's a lesson that you could take
out of that
and if you had a request to the world of
product designers what's something from
an object that you've seen that you
could
take inspiration and say hey man if
every other manufacturer would do that
that would be really really cool
um and so all of course i'll start with
patagonia uh
and so one thing that patagonia did they
have a a luggage um
a piece of luggage and and the common on
luggage the handles break you know you
have the extended uh
handle on on roller luggage and they
said one of their their top managers was
at an airport
and the handle stuck open and he's you
know the executive of patagonia
and he had to like break the handle over
his knee in order to get it onto the
plane and he was so ashamed at that
experience and he said never again and
they redesigned it where
they the handle is a cartridge and there
are color-coded screws
and and so if you call patty going you
need help they just send you a new
handle cartridge and then your luggage
is good to go so that's like thinking
about that common failure point and then
building a system around that
that's an amazing story we had so many
retractable suitcase handles that
we stopped accepting we stopped because
it was a waste of everyone's time
you can't do it you can't repair them
generally yeah
this is the only luggage i've ever seen
with a repairable retractable luggage
handle
yeah i mean i guess like there are
i think yeah we'd have to have a whole
conversation about why
there are certain markets for things
that last
uh because something that came to mind
when you're saying that is i've had this
um laptop backpack since grad school
it's about 15 years old now and it's one
of the one of the few things i've owned
that's become like deeply
unfashionable on like it looks like it's
from 2005 but it's like whatever
and it just like i don't know how much
longer it will last
but it it is you know it just takes a
licking and just keeps going
you know and so it's um you know it's a
timbuktube backpack and it's just
built really really well um so like
where
where those markets are and why they are
is a really interesting question
well it's i can add praise to timbuktu
they have added repair guides for their
uh
bags too i fix it and they do repairs in
san francisco so if you mail your repair
into them their sewers in san francisco
will fix it for you and send it back
they're a fantastic organization
that's cool i have a good response i
think and that is to
honor the humble table lamp or floor
land
so think about this for a moment first i
will say that
we see more lamps than any other type of
repair
by far and and
so apart from you know a few fads with
you know halogen
illumination and so forth almost every
lamp that you see
when you look at the socket it is just
about the same
as the socket 15 20 or 30 years ago it's
upgraded
yeah yeah and so what
people bring lamps that
they actually have a great attachment to
again table lamps
floor lamps many of them are very
beautiful
and very unusual they are unique in
their design
and and people you know they really
would like to keep them they really
don't want to get a replacement
but you know they do not know where to
take it and
so lamp parts are it's the one category
of parts that we actually stock we have
you know sockets uh three-way
various kinds of sockets switches uh and
plugs and
wire and those those are
very gratifying to fix now i'll tell you
that every repair manual
of any description that has been
published in the last hundred plus years
has very simple instructions on how to
rewire a lamp
and yet you know i you know it's
electricity so
oh my gosh if i do it wrong i might burn
down my house so
these lamps come into our repair cafes
they they are the parts are absolutely
almost always interchangeable we can
always
take a uh you know a socket from our box
and and put it right in and it will work
beautifully
it's very satisfying i'm just like so
excited by all the good things you guys
said
i guess i'll i guess i'll kind of like
give a nice shout out to basically all
of textiles here
like textiles has is
really repairable there's such a deep
tradition and such a
wealth of knowledge to draw on that's
still happily really active
all across society there's such uh
creative repair
in terms of textiles um it it's
it's it's doable it works it's out there
and it really
is kind of amazing i i think these are
all
inspirational examples all right so my
very final question for you
is i mean we have three magnificent
books here they're all they're all
fantastic i've read
all three and they are i can happily
recommend all three to everybody but i
am curious
to hear from each of you if you could
pick the type of person that you would
like to read your book
who do you think it is most important
who out there
in the world needs to hear your message
the most i think
it is mostly we hope
that the people who find this book want
to make their
towns stronger want to make their towns
more resilient
want to discover within their towns
people who have remarkable skills
that they have been basically you know
hiding their light under a bushel uh and
you know when you bring those people
together and you see the way they bond
and you see
you know the way people come in and then
leave you know so
happy you know a lot of stuff gets fixed
people leave very happy
and uh it's it is that it's it's a
palpable
strengthening of community and anybody
with an interest in that
ought to ought to latch on to this
so i guess fixation is written for a
person
who doesn't feel great
about their patterns of consumption but
they don't quite know what to do about
it
they might feel a little overwhelmed by
their stuff or a little overwhelmed by
the feeling
that they're trashing the planet every
time they
eat or buy something
but is not an expert is not like deep
into this
but i think hopefully they would buy the
book and feel like yeah i can do this
and i understand how this connects to
some of those really big problems
i think that you rather than a really
approachable way uh and so absolutely
i'm i'm i'm excited about that leigh how
about you
your book is is a little bit higher
level and you're looking more
more at systems and society who who do
you think it's important to see
the picture that you're painting i think
you know policymakers would be
one group we'd like to hit but i really
you know
going all the way back to when andy and
i started the maintainers together
it's mostly like people who
whether in organizations or in daily
life with their stuff have
been become frustrated with the way we
talk about innovation
um and the way we focus on new shiny
stuff and kind of like
you know um fail to give recognition to
the people who keep our world going
and fail to properly value maintenance
and repair
as a part of our culture and what we
found is that there's lots of people who
and i'm sure
you all know too that there's just lots
of people in our society right now who
are
waiting to hear that message i think you
know people read you know
read our essays or hear a book read her
book or whatever you know see things
like this and they're just like
i've always felt something like this but
i've been waiting for someone to say it
out loud
and i think that all three of our books
kind of like touch on that and
so hopefully our the people who need to
hear it will find it
well this has been a wonderful
conversation i've certainly enjoyed it i
want to do this again
what a wonderful group of people who
have spent so much time
thinking about this issue very deeply
and and articulating it in these books
um do uh head your head your
support your local bookstore and and get
a copy and
hopefully we'll have more of these
conversations on the ifixit channel
in the future