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Maker Faire Detroit 2010
Repair 2.0: Reinventing the way we fix things

The US has a long-standing culture of repairing cars: there is a massive parts, documentation, and resale infrastructure built around using cars as long as possible. This is more challenging with electronics due to increases in complexity and model proliferation. Without subsidies, it's not economically viable to recycle electronics in the developed world. So our devices migrate elsewhere. Relying on media reports from non-engineers of this digital waste stream wasn't enough for me. I wanted to find out first-hand what problems my engineering was causing overseas, so I followed containers of product to Ghana, Kenya, Cameroon, and South Africa. I learned where the products that we design end up, how creative people are at fixing things, and who profits from our outmoded products. I also learned about the Jua Kali– people running the informal sector of the Kenyan economy who make their living as modern-day MacGyvers. They hack, dissect, repair, and make an astonishing variety of things with stunningly primitive tools. Their creativity is manifested in car body work, scrap metal sculpture, board-level cell phone repair, and domain-specific engineering to solve hyper-local problems that I had no idea existed. These people aren't inventing new technology– rather, they're mashing up things that we've already made, modifying them to suit their needs, and provide solutions to a group of people that are completely off the radar of product engineers.

Web site: http://www.ifixit.com/

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About the Maker(s)

Kyle Wiens
Kyle Wiens is co-founder of iFixit, a collaborative repair community and electronics parts retailer. iFixit is dedicated to helping people everywhere keep their hardware running longer. He co-authored the original Fixit Guide series of step-by-step repair manuals for Apple hardware while studying Computer Science at Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo. Kyle is a board member of Softec and the IEEE Consumer Electronics Society. He has spoken widely on cloud computing, technical writing, making service documentation accessible to the world, and sustainable consumer electronics device design. In his spare time, Kyle kayaks and tinkers with robots.
www.ifixit.com