Abstract
This chapter describes initial results from an ethnographic study of design and engineering engagements in community-operated sites at which hobbyists mend and repair mass-produced goods. We conducted participant observation at seven repair events and two collectives in the San Francisco Bay area where consumer electronics are reassembled, and spoke with approximately eighty repair practitioners. Here we describe surprising connections between repair and social movements that, in turn, reveal deep ties between contemporary hobbyist repair and countercultural design practices of the 1960s. These links, we argue, open new and important areas for design research.
Keywords
- Social Movement
- Design Practice
- Repair Activity
- Repair Work
- Electronic Waste
These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
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Notes
- 1.
Qualitative methods characterize causal processes, recognize new phenomena, present auxiliary evidence for existing hypotheses, and identify counterexamples (Burrell and Toyama 2009). Unlike statistical methods, qualitative methods are good at pinpointing what about people’s lived experiences of repair is important and why (Bauer and Gaskell 2000). Through long-term observation and interviews we can examine why people choose to repair some possessions and discard others, and how certain artifacts achieve heirloom status. We cannot make representative claims, test hypotheses, reveal trends, or answer questions of how often and how much — aims that qualitative methods are ill-suited to address. Instead, we seek to produce “observable-reportable” (Garfinkel and Sacks 1970: 342) understandings of the practical (and practiced) work of repair.
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Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank the Hasso Plattner Design Thinking Research Program HPDTRP for funding this project. We would also like to thank the participants in the repair collectives we observed and our research subjects who made this work possible.
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Rosner, D.K., Turner, F. (2015). Theaters of Alternative Industry: Hobbyist Repair Collectives and the Legacy of the 1960s American Counterculture. In: Plattner, H., Meinel, C., Leifer, L. (eds) Design Thinking Research. Understanding Innovation. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-06823-7_5
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