Step By Step Repair
February 27, 2024 3:20 PM Subscribe
What if we could extend those basic principles — that repair should be social, embodied, intuitive, accessible — beyond the device or object? Could we apply these logics at the scale of civic systems and public spaces?
Thank you for sharing.
I immediately dove in and was so thankful: a word that had escaped me for years was in there. "Jugaad", an Indian word for jury-rigging / hacking objects to make them more ___. As a chronic tinkerer I have ripped open the black boxes--especially those destined for landfill--to try and squeeze some salvage or, failing that, understand why the part that failed caused the whole system to die too.
It's a very satisfying, detective-like feeling that this article describes very well, and I am confident that we may have no choice BUT to take community ownership of local spaces. I especially enjoy other stories about neighborhoods that shut down the street to pedestrian traffic only, or paint gigantic murals on the intersection that involve community members of all ages. It's like reverse vandalism!
posted by Khazk at 8:18 PM on February 27 [3 favorites]
I immediately dove in and was so thankful: a word that had escaped me for years was in there. "Jugaad", an Indian word for jury-rigging / hacking objects to make them more ___. As a chronic tinkerer I have ripped open the black boxes--especially those destined for landfill--to try and squeeze some salvage or, failing that, understand why the part that failed caused the whole system to die too.
It's a very satisfying, detective-like feeling that this article describes very well, and I am confident that we may have no choice BUT to take community ownership of local spaces. I especially enjoy other stories about neighborhoods that shut down the street to pedestrian traffic only, or paint gigantic murals on the intersection that involve community members of all ages. It's like reverse vandalism!
posted by Khazk at 8:18 PM on February 27 [3 favorites]
I thought it kind of fell apart at the end. It started out well, but then lost track. Breakdowns started at the Apple field guide, as though repairing a phone is somehow required to be easy, cheap, and accessible to the common man with no limitations, and repeats "old man yells at cloud" type complaints starting about there.
Then it really starts to go off the rails at the pull quote "But as critic Michael Sorkin argued, New Urbanism “promotes [a] style of universality that … is over-reliant on visual cues in attempting to produce social effects. … Harboring a single species (the white middle class) in a habitat of dulling uniformity, the New Urbanism seeks the stability of the perfectly predictable, a Prozac halcyon in which nothing can go wrong.”
Is that kind of shade leveled at every other repair guide? At what point did "right to repair" become "forced to repair"?
And it gets worse:
"What do we remedy when we deploy a manual to fix a car or a phone? What larger systemic breaks — dysfunctions enabled by these same gadgets — go unquestioned? "
First, go unquestioned? Has the author literally never repaired anything? The first question is always "can I do without making this repair?", because the HUGE UNQUESTIONED ASSUMPTION in the entire article is that repairing things is fun/wholesome/ when instead it's just another burden in living one's life.
Yeah I said it: having to repair stuff when it's not your full time job sucks. It's a burden. Maybe it imparts some useful knowledge to help you grow your character, but mostly it's just a burden that's surpassed so you can get on with whatever you needed that tool for. It's a burden: it's an expense where you have to spend money and time to get something back you already had. It's worse if it's something you need immediately.
In any case, in the middle of repairing your *thing* is when you see it's value the most, even if you are generally anti or neutral *the thing*. Even if that wasn't true, then why when you just used *a thing* "to brokenness" would one question it's use? That just seems extremely solipsistic, like you can question you car's place in society while it's perfectly useful and sitting in your driveway. You can make an active decision to leave it there and walk, rather than being forced to do so by it's brokenness.
posted by The_Vegetables at 10:46 AM on February 28 [1 favorite]
Then it really starts to go off the rails at the pull quote "But as critic Michael Sorkin argued, New Urbanism “promotes [a] style of universality that … is over-reliant on visual cues in attempting to produce social effects. … Harboring a single species (the white middle class) in a habitat of dulling uniformity, the New Urbanism seeks the stability of the perfectly predictable, a Prozac halcyon in which nothing can go wrong.”
Is that kind of shade leveled at every other repair guide? At what point did "right to repair" become "forced to repair"?
And it gets worse:
"What do we remedy when we deploy a manual to fix a car or a phone? What larger systemic breaks — dysfunctions enabled by these same gadgets — go unquestioned? "
First, go unquestioned? Has the author literally never repaired anything? The first question is always "can I do without making this repair?", because the HUGE UNQUESTIONED ASSUMPTION in the entire article is that repairing things is fun/wholesome/ when instead it's just another burden in living one's life.
Yeah I said it: having to repair stuff when it's not your full time job sucks. It's a burden. Maybe it imparts some useful knowledge to help you grow your character, but mostly it's just a burden that's surpassed so you can get on with whatever you needed that tool for. It's a burden: it's an expense where you have to spend money and time to get something back you already had. It's worse if it's something you need immediately.
In any case, in the middle of repairing your *thing* is when you see it's value the most, even if you are generally anti or neutral *the thing*. Even if that wasn't true, then why when you just used *a thing* "to brokenness" would one question it's use? That just seems extremely solipsistic, like you can question you car's place in society while it's perfectly useful and sitting in your driveway. You can make an active decision to leave it there and walk, rather than being forced to do so by it's brokenness.
posted by The_Vegetables at 10:46 AM on February 28 [1 favorite]
The_Vegetables, surely it is true that something can be both a burden and sucky when you are doing it because you have to, and also fun/wholesome/rewarding when you do it as a matter of choice? For me, walking is the thing. If I am walking to get to somewhere where I have to be, and it's too hot or too rainy or whatever, then I can deeply resent having to get to where I'm going, and, because of a decision to do without a car whenever possible, putting myself in a position where I have to get there in a way that keeps exposing me to heat or rain or whatever. But I'm going to keep making those decisions, because I enjoy walking rather than driving whenever it is possible, and I think that I and the world am better overall when I do so, even if I might not thereby be maximizing my moment-to-moment happiness.
posted by It is regrettable that at 7:51 AM on February 29
posted by It is regrettable that at 7:51 AM on February 29
The_Vegetables, surely it is true that something can be both a burden and sucky when you are doing it because you have to, and also fun/wholesome/rewarding when you do it as a matter of choice?
Absolutely, and even though repairing your stuff can be a burden when you need it *right now*, it can also be a mark of pride as something you accomplished (afterwards), a personal nod to recycling/reuse rather than discarding, and a hobby more active that sitting and watching tv, if you are into that funk, an avenue to learning a new skill. It's all of those things.
So that's actually why I found it disappointing that he went so hard being negative about certain types of repairing stuff at the end, without even contemplating the downside of repairing stuff in general. It seemed a bit uneven. If he had been 100% positive, I probably wouldn't have even mentioned it, because anyone who has ever had to repair anything has had all those emotions about it.
posted by The_Vegetables at 8:56 AM on March 1 [1 favorite]
Absolutely, and even though repairing your stuff can be a burden when you need it *right now*, it can also be a mark of pride as something you accomplished (afterwards), a personal nod to recycling/reuse rather than discarding, and a hobby more active that sitting and watching tv, if you are into that funk, an avenue to learning a new skill. It's all of those things.
So that's actually why I found it disappointing that he went so hard being negative about certain types of repairing stuff at the end, without even contemplating the downside of repairing stuff in general. It seemed a bit uneven. If he had been 100% positive, I probably wouldn't have even mentioned it, because anyone who has ever had to repair anything has had all those emotions about it.
posted by The_Vegetables at 8:56 AM on March 1 [1 favorite]
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I wish it was easier for me to make time to promptly read and engage with an 8600-word article (the internet tells me it will take half an hour to read, but that's assuming, of course, that I don't give in regularly to the urge to get sidetracked by all the cool bits of history and all the intriguing ideas in the piece, which I would, or at least I would like to).
But even without reading it carefully, yet, I can say that I really like the ideas here, as well as just the personal history, and the history of the ephemera. I have so many user manuals ... and I have written so many user manuals, mostly for software that doesn't even exist anymore.
But I love and embrace the idea of using manuals to help others make social changes that have had some successes, to help create a world where we don't always have to start from scratch every time.
And I also love and embrace the idea of using the actual idea of user manuals to reconsider what works and what could work better and whether the way we interact with a given object is good for us, good for the world, or harmful.
I am looking forward to coming back to this and reading it more deeply, and more wanderingly, but for now, I just wanted to thank you for posting it, and for giving me the full read to look forward to.
Thank you, Fiasco da Gama!
posted by kristi at 5:33 PM on February 27 [5 favorites]