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    Design for Repair
    Design for Repair
    Design for Repair
    Ebook53 pages31 minutes

    Design for Repair

    By Derrick Mead

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    About this ebook

    Repair is a design constraint and an outcome of product design. It’s also a practical activity performedor noton 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. Design for Repair investigates the historical and current state of repair in material culture as it applies specifically to product designers. The economic, technical, and psychological limitations to making things more repairable are explored, with the electric toaster taken as an example. The repairable products of several designers operating under special contemporary conditions are examined in detail, and the implications that a more repairable material culture might have for issues including personal agency, macro- and microeconomics, and the environment are considered.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherDesignFile
    Release dateMay 19, 2015
    ISBN9781942303053
    Design for Repair

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      Book preview

      Design for Repair - Derrick Mead

      Introduction

      Repair is a design constraint, an outcome of product design, and a practical activity performed—or not—on designed objects. The knowledge and understanding required to design things well is similar to the knowledge and understanding required to fix those things effectively, but in practice, these shared capacities get applied to very different ends. Both agents, the designer and the repairer, seek to solve similar problems from opposing starting points, with different limitations. Holistic, empathic thinking is key from either vantage: empathy for the user, as well as the object. Designing a product creates an archetype which is then reproduced ad infinitum; repair is necessarily a one-to-one exchange, focused on a specific designed object. Design is speculative, multitudinous, and detached: one designer, to many objects, to many users. Repair is concrete, singular, and inherently personal, in these terms of fixer, user, and object: one to one to one.[1]

      Product design is engaged with ideals, creating the best solution possible within physical and abstract constraints, like budgets, or aesthetic sensibilities: the most good for the largest number, frequently at the lowest possible overall cost. Repair is mired in the morbidity of extant things and, rather than seeking improvement, most often focuses squarely on good enough, or getting back to normal, the designed-for functionality that preceded mishap. Instead of looking out into blue sky and seeing something that wasn’t there before, repairers must look deeply into something that’s right in front of them and figure out what to change, replace, or strengthen in order to return it—a toaster, for example—back to service.

      Asking designers, technicians, and engineers about repair abstractly—or, more precisely, asking professionals concerned with the functioning of objects to consider repair as an ideal—has frequently led to confusion from parties on both sides of the design/repair divide. A question like Why aren’t durable goods designed specifically for easy repair? incurs the same skeptical look from designers as What would you change about the things you work on, to make them easier to fix? gets from tradespeople. The polarity of this spectrum, with designers on one end, products (and users) in the middle, and repairers on the other end, makes for real difficulty in communicating vital information about what people want and need from their belongings under less-than-ideal circumstances, how they actually use them, and finally—most important, here—what happens when things break.

      Investigating repair in the abstract took me from the suburban labs of Underwriters Laboratories to the offices of mechanical engineers at Consumer Reports, from dingy appliance repair shops in Brooklyn to gleaming technical training institutes in midtown Manhattan, from landfills on Labor Day to Macy’s 34th Street on Black Friday, and finally, to the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum. I spoke with working designers and technicians, graduate students and their professors, product marketing managers and customer service representatives, salespeople and junk haulers.

      In searching for a specific object on which to focus my investigation, the common kitchen toaster came up again and again. As it turned out, Bill Moggridge, the late director of the Cooper Hewitt, and Bob Della Valle, principal engineer for cooking appliances at Underwriters Laboratories, both designed toasters early in their careers. Derek Brine, an instructor at

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