FIXPERTS

Design has a long tradition of social imagination through film.  In the 1920s, the Bauhaus in Dessau produced a film to publicise and promote some of its architecture.  Its film “The Way We Live Now” presents and proposes a wide range of modernist designs, objects, architectures and practices.  More than just a film, it is a proposal for a lifestyle.  Through films such as this one, modernism suggested a sense of normality, and that designers not only had responsibility for solving problems but for proposing what kind of lifestyle is normal in any case.  We still live in the wake of this modernist sense of a “normal lifestyle”, to the extent that a unified sense of normality has sometimes come to be problematic for designers.  

If there were a film “the way we live as Fixperts”, the “we” would be very interesting, because Fixperts projects are full of diversity.  As individuals, people engaging with Fixperts all seem to have very individual and distinct issues with their lives.  One person has physical difficulties with putting their trousers on, as in the award-winning “The Right Trousers” video.  In another project, a food delivery service cannot fit its delivery box on to the back of a moped easily.  The Fix-partners in a Fixperts project, whoever they are, seem in some sense magnetic and charismatic.  As a video unfolds, we find out more about them, their lives and how they want to live.  The emerging lessons we learn about these other people place us as an audience on a gradient of difference, students of social difference and of the extraordinary variety of lives people lead in their own homes and workplaces, and the variety of difficulties they encounter.  

The modernist design approaches of the twentieth century have left us with a design burden and heritage which different designers respond to in different ways.  One of the ways is user-centred design, in which design responds to problems in the world.  However, it seems that most Fixperts projects are only indirectly responding to ‘problems’.  What seems to be most important in many of the projects is not that Fix Partners aspire to live ‘normally’ somehow, but rather that Fix Partners themselves make the decision as to what is normal anyway.  In video after video, a Fix Partner specifies not so much what their problem is, but rather how they would like to be living.  This ‘design of aspiration’ displaces  to a certain extent a conception of user-centred design as a quest to find and conceptualise the ‘problem’, because the criteria by which things are judged to be problematic itself shifts.

In its displacement of normativity, and by seeing Fix Partners as the owners of what is normal anyway, Fixperts projects often seem like celebrations of difference and diversity.  Fix Partnerships cross boundaries, bringing together different generations, people in public and private institutions, people with expertise in different professions, and people with very different physiques.  It is within this difference that we can begin to think about the values which are being transacted in Fixpert videos.  The videos manifest value in many ways.  They represent a sense of aspiration, they represent a particular kind of specific design problem, and perhaps most importantly they embody and show the work involved.  Value emerges not only embedded in a designed ‘thing’, but within the contexts, spaces, routines, and identities.  

In anthropology, value is very often about exchanges, but these are of different kinds.  Some exchanges are about lots of similar people working together - for example, a rural community gathering in the harvest for one another, where everyone pitches in together and, for a period at least, they are the same.  Other exchanges are posited on difference, where the production of value necessitates different kinds of people, with different skills, knowledges, resources, experiences, and capacities.  

The particular value models of Fixperts projects, and their associated videos, seem to work well.  They work within the particular kinds of frameworks of Fixperts and Fix Partners (often but not always groups of design students and individuals in their homes).  And the forms of value may also work elsewhere.  The designs generated are particular to Fix Partners, they are in a sense owned by them;  and yet the videos document how the Fixperts have generated them, and are testament to the ownership by the designers.  The videos render the work involved as visible, not invisible (as is often the case in design).  They also generate a dialectic between the particular and the generic, where a very specific design enters a global domain through video media.  All of this helps in the imagination and demonstration of a world of intersecting senses of values, considerations and care.  

Where we want to go

Partnerships with Universities – students in to schools to support Fixperts projects

D&T GCSE / A + AS Level – Connection with examination boards

Fixperts Project format for schools, run independently in-house with support.

Fixperts Schools Award (Design Museum

& Deutche Bank Design Ventura model)

Primary school projects (Gallions Model)

Challenges

Building connections with schools and possible partnerships with universities

Developing a new format for Fixperts, different from HE - Key concepts need to be introduced gradually – no counting on prior knowledge

Working within schools’ constraints (Timetabling, curriculum and examination requirements, overstretched teachers, reluctance to move from familiar models, assessment)

Case Study: Integrating the Fixperts philosophy in to a given theme -

Series of 3 workshops with Gallions Primary School, Beckton, in collaboration with Institute of Imagination

Using a step-by-step approach, we built a series of workshops responding to the school’s request to work with children and their families around the theme of Health and Wellbeing.

These steps were:

Understand how objects solve problems by analyzing existing products.

Develop observation skills and the ability to identify problems in their own world, by charting ‘A Day in My Life’ and noting areas they think may benefit from improvement.

From these, extracting three main areas and working on ideas to address these problems, using sketching and simple modeling.

Experimenting with a chosen idea as a viable product, by naming it, explaining and presenting it to others, and by experiencing the possibilities of more advanced prototyping through 3D printing, integrating electronics, etc.

I’m cold! It’s raining! I can’t reach!

Analysing products, what problem they solved and how they solved it

A Day in My Life sheet

A child’s design of an Airobrush, addressing children’s reluctance to brush their teeth ‘because it’s not fun’.

Brussel-sprout football, encouraging children to eat vegetables through play – if you suffer a goal, you eat a sprout!

The Bee Bottle – helping children drink more water during the day

Tzise – a pedal chair that powers you telly – if you don’t pedal, your telly won’t work!

Lea Jagendorf is a designer and a design educator, with an MA in Graphic Design from the Royal College of Art in London, and a PGCE in Design & Technology from Goldsmith University of London. 

Designers

As I’ve written previously on the Fixperts blog, Fixperts speaks of the diversifying role of designers today, as many move from conceiving commercial products to working to facilitate our everyday through systems and service design.  In this shift in focus from things to people, there is also a shift in mentality.  As Gad Charny of the Holon Institute of Technology noted, through adopting the Fixperts method designers are 'realising that can have real impact on real people'.  This is a statement about empowerment that complicates any simplistic interpretation of Fixperts as altruistic - both Fixperts and Fixpartners have the potential to benefit from their involvement.  Benefits can be seen in other ways - it turns out that Fixperts can ‘fix’ another problem that has been emerging in recent years in design – the reliance on digital technologies.  Speaking about the daylong Fixperts project she ran at Sussex University, Claire Potter observed that the short-time frame, low-tech and iterative emphasis ensured that students couldn’t unthinkingly rely on digital technologies.  Instead, they had to revisit making techniques to come up with their ad hoc solutions, an approach that will hopefully inform their future work.

Not all aspects of the designer’s identity are changing however. Rygalik lamented that designers couldn't stop being - well, designers - as they added extra details or sought to improve aspects that were outside of the agreed brief.  Whether or not this was a bad thing was something that I’d question, but it was interesting nevertheless to think about the particular restrictions and freedoms of a Fixperts brief.

Users

Fixperts isn’t just having an impact on how we think about designers, but users too.  It isn’t enough to abstractly conceive of what the consumer wants – with Fixperts designers have to invest in a relationship with the user in ways that go beyond many co-design approaches.  A successful outcome is predicated on the identification of a problem that the designer can actually solve, the ability to realise models and prototypes through which the Fixpartner then needs to be able to articulate what does and does not work.  This can take hours, days, weeks. Throughout this process it is vital that there is communication and trust between Fixpert and Fixpartner, a question of dynamics and power not yet fully explored.

One of the most interesting, if personally uncomfortable, discussions of the day was the concept of finding a “good” Fixpartner.  This seemed to be someone who had the ‘right’ personality (whatever that means) and also the ‘right’ sort of problem (whatever that means too).  I’m being a bit provocative here, as not everyone voiced this opinion, yet surely everyone has the right to access the potential benefits of the Fixperts experience, and if the relationship is problematic then perhaps this aspect needs to be as well ‘designed’ as the rest of Fixperts method.

There was also the challenge of finding users, of accessing those who need help but don’t have the connections or the confidence to find it.  This is certainly a challenge that Fixperts, and all socially engaged designers, need to address.

The Films

One of the ways that Fixperts has gained such prominence so quickly is through its films.  Each project is recorded through a film that, according to the Fixperts Guidelines, should be a ‘compelling story’ that captures ‘the people, the problem and the process involved’. These are then loaded onto the Fixperts website. There are around 135 currently online  - excluding those uploaded onto sites other than Fixperts - and more waiting to go up. Many of these are incredibly powerful, moving endorsements of what Fixperts can achieve: the lightness of Edna’s video almost belies the real difference that the sockhorn makes on her life, while the story of Foridha’s wheelchair was one of the first, and most unforgettable, Fixperts films I’ve seen.  These and other films have been so internationally popular that the sheer amount of viewings has even managed to crash the Fixperts website.

Yet the feel-good nature of the films, epitomised by the popularity of using songs such as Pharrell Williams’ Happy as the soundtrack, troubles me slightly. Admittedly this could be because I’m a cold and cynical English person (!), yet I wasn’t alone. Sutcliffe posed a flash poll to the Salon audience, and found that just over half would prefer the films to have no music, in part because it was felt it detracted from the film’s power.

The film is one of the most interesting aspects of Fixperts – I’d suggest it is the first product design initiative to have an accompanying moving image presence, a combination of media and disciplines that merits further investigation. Yet the films raises a number of questions - how can Fixperts maintain the authentic, empowering message of the films if the presentation becomes formulaic? Should a film be made for every Fixperts project?  Should music be banned, or required?  What other ways could film play a role in Fixperts, and what does its inclusion right in the inception of a Fixperts brief say about the changing practice of design itself, in which as much emphasis is placed on the communication of design as its development and realisation?

The Objects

My final reflection is about an aspect that was surprisingly little discussed during the salon. This was the object, the fixes, the physical manifestation of the Fixperts process.  This isn’t just true of the Salon. Compare the objects with the films: while the latter are archived online, there is no collection of the actual designs available anywhere.  

On the one hand this dematerialising tendency makes sense, a reaction against the emphasis on products over people that has defined much commercial design in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Daniel Charny was amongst those to emphasise the importance of the films over the objects, of use over appearance, and others similarly suggested that aesthetics weren’t important.  I’m not convinced about this. It is the physical fix that remains the material legacy of the Fixperts process, the thing that (hopefully) continues to improve the Fixpartner’s life long after the project is over. Surely it is important that these have as much aesthetic as emotional appeal, even if the appearance of the fix doesn’t correspond to the stylistic criteria of most design products? Actually, I’d suggest this anti-aesthetic position speaks of an increasing appreciation for a very old aesthetic.  This is the adhoc, an ‘undesigned’ artefact defined by past and future fixes and realised using the limited resources available, and an object typology of interest to everyone from the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss to Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe.

The objects that result from the Fixperts process raise other aspects relevant to the broader condition of design and manufacture today. Some speakers struggled to find names for the objects that resulted, many of which were re-iterations of recognisable object typologies. Instead, phrases like a ‘sort of’ or a ‘type of’ were used to describe these strange hybrid manifestations. I found this fascinating, in particular because I don’t think this linguistic and artefactual problem is going to go away: as we tiptoe ever closer towards mass customisation and even to domestic 3D printers, there is the possibility that we can all have our own bespoke things, that may not fit in with existing objects archetypes and typologies or the language that we use to describe these.

The object also brings me back to generosity, a quality raised at the beginning of this text.  There is an inbuilt charity to Fixperts, in which designers volunteer their time to design things that meet people’s real needs.  The resulting objects are not capitalist commodities – no money is exchanged and instead the object is what Edna rather wonderfully called a ‘present’. It seems a shame then that not everyone in need can benefit from the gift that Fixperts represents. While some of the fixes are highly bespoke, others, like Edna’s sockhorn, would benefit a huge range of people.  There’s nothing stopping anyone being inspired by the films to make their own versions of the designs, and in some instances the one-off fix has lead to a larger scale of production, or the designs are available online in different ways – yet there is no complete catalogue of the designs.  An open licensing system would be one way to address this problem, an idea that was discussed on the day.

Whether in terms of designers, users, films or the artefacts, I think it is this question of access that represents Fixperts’ biggest challenge: how to make its benefits reach the widest number of people possible, and how to turn us all into Fixperts and Fixpartners.

I’d like to end by thanking Fixperts, the Stanley Picker Gallery and all those who spoke, fixed or otherwise participated in the Super Salon, an inspiring event that deserves a regular place on the design calendar.

Images from Top:

1 - Fixperts Super Salon Day 1 - Fix & Repair Drop-In Day. Credit: Ezzidin Alwan, Kingston University

2 - Gad Charny, professor of Industrial Design at Holon Institute of Technology Israel, fixes a toy brought in by a member of the public. Credit: Ezzidin Alwan, Kingston University

3 - Fixperts help Jayson who dropped in on the Fix & Repair day to find a fix for his wheelchair controls, which sometimes stop working in the rain. Credit: Ezzidin Alwan, Kingston University

4 - Claire Potter, independent designer and tutor at Sussex University, gives her presentation on the second "Think-Tank” day. Credit: Daniel Charny

5 - Helen Cresswell and Tom Cox, founders of Fixhub Padiham, share their work and philosophy with the audience. Credit: Daniel Charny

Cat Rossi is a design historian based at Kingston University, who is interested in researching, writing, talking and teaching about design past and present for a wide range of audiences.

Around the same time, MAKLAb, Scotland’s first digital fabrication workshop was established in Glasgow. In the broader context of the maker movement inspiring interest in how things worked, an enthusiastic group of designers, makers and engineering types set up a Repair Cafe. On Saturday mornings we would try to fix broken objects of the general public. 

We would patch up holes in jumpers using Wool Filler. We laser cut new parts for broken toys. I was taught how to darn my jean shorts by a textile designer, and in return repaired her showerhead using Sugru. Repairing things meant learning new skills from one another, and helped us to understand alternative uses for the machines in this new makerspace. It felt empowering to repair these objects and no doubt we solved some daily problems for those members of the public that showed up and let us tinker with their broken things. With each thing that we successfully fixed, there was an element of novelty to the process. However, at that time MAKLab was situated just minutes from Buchanan Street, Glasgow’s main shopping precinct, and it was difficult to shake the feeling that these broken items could, if we chose to, be replaced with new products faster than we could fix.

Six months later, finding a mechanism to get Make Works off the ground, I found myself on an expedition of my own - to find and film 120 factories across Scotland in three months. This exploration took us from the central cities of Glasgow and Edinburgh, to Unst, the north-most tip of Shetland and back, via each and every island, industrial estate and workshop we could find. 

What we realised on these islands was that whilst you might be able to order replacement parts, it is often faster to repair what you’ve already got.. This observation started with the multiple breakdowns of our VW Moonraker, where the speedy advantages of speedy gaffer tape modelling beat any attempt to source replacement 1979 parts. 

What we observed in these remarkable places were not only ways of making, but the multiple ways of fixing that were taking place. Repair was not romanticised or even celebrated. It became clear: in the factory, fixing is an everyday way of life. 

Skye Weavers. 

Bonas-Griffiths looms are now used by the majority of weavers in the Outer Hebrides making Harris Tweed. 

Developed in the 1990’s to be more efficient than original Hattersley looms, Bonas-Griffiths looms are distinctive in that the entire loom is powered from a mechanism similar to a bicycle cog and pedal system. This single source of movement drives the yarn, rapier, cogs and cutters across the machine as it weaves double length cloth. The pedal-powered ‘clack’ used to be heard throughout the island of Lewis as men wove in the sheds behind their crofts. 

Coming across a broken loom, Andrea and Rodger of Skye Weavers went about refurbishing it and now uses it to run a successful pedal-powered textile business from the island of Skye. It is full of adaptations to make the company’s working methods easier, such as attaching a watchstrap so that the pair of weavers can challenge each other to pedal faster and get their production times down. 

These weavers also made their own warping mill by cobbling together the wheels of a broken Massey-Harris tractor and old dishwasher parts. This mill is quietly ingenious and is a stark comparison to the larger mills in the Scottish Borders, where the same warping process are completed by complex machines are shut away behind large plastic screens. The understated brilliance of the machine is that if it breaks they have the power to fix it. 

MYB textiles

Morton Young and Borland was founded in Ayrshire in 1900. Today the company still uses the original Nottingham looms to manufacture intricate Scottish Lace and Madras. These 90-year-old machines are no longer in production and so repairing them is essential for the business. 

The mill has a workshop above the factory floor dedicated to repairing old parts and training up apprentices to mend their machines. They frequently connect with local fabricators to manufacture replacement parts. For example, working with local water jet cutter, Jet Cut in Hillington, to cut new combs. 

MYB have also worked with MAKLab to laser cut pattern cards. This shift is highlighting how digital fabrication techniques are being used by factories not just to manufacture the new, but to retain production processes of the past. 

Finding local manufacturers to repair machinery is also an unexpected way that makers across Scotland have been using Make Works. Just last week we spoke with a weaver who had used the platform to connect with a foundry to cast a new part for her loom. 

Jamiesons of Shetland

The Jamiesons factory in Shetland sits at the end of a one-track road, where sheep surround the outside and Fair Isle jumpers are being knitted at the other end. Being so remote means that the family-run business makes everything in-house, from dyeing the raw fleece, to spinning it into yarn and knitting it up into garments.

http://vimeo.com/96678880

Unlikely to persuade Shima technicians to journey this far north if a machine breaks down, the family have taken it upon themselves to understand the fundamentals of each piece of their machinery. Throughout the factory a myriad of fixes on these can be spotted on the machines, from floating plastic water bottles measuring the levels of the dye, to coat hangers and string supports in the carding mechanics. These adaptations might not be beautiful, but they definitely work. 

Journeyman Leather 

Jo Tonkinson is leather worker and saddle maker. So few of the specialised tools she trained with are still made today, she has developed a fantastic collection of customised tools for her work. There is an honest practicality about these objects, fixed up from what can be found, and made specifically for the job in hand. 

From the expedition, we discovered that ways of fixing in the factory were not romanticised, instead it just was a part of day-to-day business. If the maker movement is about retooling society, then we should try not to be drawn in by the spectacle of making new things. Instead, we have the opportunity to look towards the factories around us that can offer insight and skills into best ways of repairing them. 

Bio + Further Details Fi Scott runs Make Works, a design-led organisation that links the arts with manufacturing via a digital platform.  To find out about Make Works, and the #makeworkstour go to www.makeworks.co.uk

Sharing, Branding and Identity

So, where to begin?

Let’s start with this idea of sharing your ideas and your work. The open source community grew out of programming and software, the term ‘hacking’ was designated by the community to describe the act of improvisation and tweaking of work by other community members.  It was expected that other members would build upon your ideas and make new iterations.  Crucially, this was recognised as a good thing!  Almost exactly as the art school was realizing the potential capital return on intellectual property, the programming community, with the advent of the nascent Internet, was recognising the importance of being open! Universal software such as Linux and Mozilla’s Firefox has grown out of this hacking process.

Recently, on a train journey with Julia Rowntree of the independent arts group Clayground Collective, I was talking about how one of my own projects needed an early adopter, a big brand.  Julia stopped me saying “I really hate that word brand! You know it derives from branding cattle and slaves!” Further enquiry, proved this to be true.  Our modern use of the word is predated by the slavery definition by a few hundred years or so. How can we forget such a powerful association? How can we countenance what it predicts? Brand slavery!

I read somewhere that our loyalty to brands is akin to a feudal loyalty. We would bare arms for our brand, emblazon ourselves with statements like “my iphone is better than your galaxy”, etc.  Why? What’s the big attraction? Sure, brands incentivise our loyalty with various freebies and communities, but these incentives have little impact on the balance sheet. So what makes us so loyal? This is an important question to our overall quest; we need to understand what most of us buy into in order to understand what the open design communities are rejecting. The most obvious pay off for the acolyte is the so called brand cache, the halo effect of association with a brand is so emotionally deep rooted that it’s almost impossible to recognise it in oneself.

I whip out my super slick iPad or my Kindle in a coffee shop on Old Street and I enjoy the ripples of recognition in the room, People like me! Of course I can see the hipsters of Hoxton in the coffee bars purposefully dressing down and being anti label in their carefully aged Chuck Taylors but as Kevin Rowland of Dexys’ Midnight Runners said “If you’re so anti fashion, why not wear flares, instead of dressing down all the same”. This affiliation is a cultural shorthand allowing me to communicate across language and express my sensibilities by association. Whether we like this or not it is a powerful phenomenon and one which the new generation of designers seem to be increasingly averse to.

Politics and Creativity 

Creative Commons and Copyleft are interesting acts of cultural and brand sabotage. They offer protection to the designer from the pervasiveness of branding by declaring that the design’s copyright is open to reproduction and customisation within certain parameters. This is a sort of protection that is out in the open by allowing editions and improvements. It is up to the designer to determine the terms of engagement such as a ‘non-commercial’ license, essentially allowing use providing you don’t make a profit, or the ‘share alike’ licence which allows use provided your outcome is shared in the same way as the original author.  

Hack Chair (2009) Ronen Kadushin.  Image: Dezeen.

Israeli designer Ronen Kadushin’s Hack Chair (2009) was an attempt to make an industrial design archetype that could be easily reproduced and hacked by subsequent designers.  Ronan released the files on the open Internet using Creative Commons licensing (share alike and non commercial) with the invitation “please copy. But if you want to make a business out of it then call me and we’ll discuss royalties. It is my intellectual property after all; that’s the bottom line” (Kadushin, 2011).   

 These attitudes towards the ownership of IP and the right to copy or hack a design have a direct correlation to the wider apolitical zeitgeist. Edward Snowdon, Occupy, the Hillsborough Justice Campaign and Change.org each in their own way repudiate the status quo. Their approach, much like Creative Commons, is to take refuge in the open, to use publicity as both a shield and weapon.  In the same way that art schools have lost track of their students’ attitudes, governments have lost track of the popular consensus.  Whoever thought that mass surveillance and phone hacking (that word again, deservedly negative) were in the public good, or that we are all actually in this together have profoundly misunderstood the enabling power of the internet and the sense of community it can provide through forums and social media.

It is almost as if government agencies felt they were a step ahead, but they were actually a heartbeat behind. The ability of special interest groups to mobilise via the World Wide Web probably represents its greatest opportunity. Occupy, in direct opposition to most western governments, claims to represent the 99% as opposed to the vested interests of the 1%, the businesses and banks. This wider political context permeates our open design communities. A new generation of designers is leveraging the Internet, to break the traditional design trajectory.  

The Ark of Many Voices (2012) Marco Monterzino.  Image: verydesignersblock

The Ark of Many Voices (2012) by Italian-born designer Marco Monterzino is a powerful testament to giving people a voice; his processions through London and Rome in which people express their opinions through the megaphone are visceral unscripted reactions against a powerlessness engendered by a patrician class devoid of empathy for their communities. The Ark of Many Voices transforms Dunne and Raby’s critical design into a defiant act of designed criticism! Monterzino gives the community a voice and the means with which to make their voice heard. This can be placed in direct opposition to Cody Wilson’s Liberator (2013), the world’s first 3D Printed Gun. Wilson made the rather spurious argument that his 3D printed weapon was an illustration of the US government’s inability to enforce gun control. Defense Distributed present their philosophy as fundamentally libertarian, but in reality are somewhere to the extreme right of the Tea Party with SolidWorks training. Not at the same party as Occupy, with their V for Vendetta-inspired Guy Fawkes anonymity. In a nod to the gallery, the V&A has decided the Liberator is so important it must have one.  As Stephen Knott has described:

The purchase seems deliberately designed to court controversy in the rhetorical sphere, while presuming perfection of the 3D printer’s power to print a working gun at the click of a button. There is little mention of the expertise within the company, which underemphasizes the difficulties of production in favor of a smooth, uncomplicated message.(Knott, 2014)

  The Liberator (2013) Cody Wilson/Defence Distributed. Image: 3Dprint

It wasn’t always thus! These acts of rebellion and provocation both to the governments and vice chancellors have taken some time to take root. The paradigm had been established for some time before Naomi Klein alerted us to the perils of brand think in 2000’s No Logo.  Hers was the first in a dripfeed of ideas that slowly created rising damp in the modernist concrete foundations of design.  In 2002 William McDonough and Michael Braungart introduced us the utopia that is ‘Cradle to Cradle’, the very act of designing recyclability into a product from the start rather than an afterthought.  

Einar Wiig, a Norwegian design historian, recently posed the question, is cradle to cradle a desperate attempt to prop up the existing broken economic model? It is a wonderfully enlightened and transgressive position to proclaim C2C is in hock to the system.  Yet when we consider it logically, C2C is in opposition to the idea of Fixperts or the Faraworkshop, both of which establish a post-manufacturing, ethical position of fixing, improvisation and upcycling.

In her 2011 Domus essay, ‘States of Design – Critical Design’, design curator Paola Antonelli introduced the ideas of the former director of Xerox Parc, John Seeley Brown, who proposed a new educational model - Learning 2.0. (Seely Brown, 2009)  Seeley describes an evolution from instruction to participation, wherein we learn through doing and we learn from each other. He describes a pedagogical shift from the sage on the stage, where learning is one shot, linear and de-contextualised to a peer community based learning, where it is exponential, continuous and situated.  This reminds me of Lave and Wengers' Communities of Practice (2000) in which the idea of legitimate peripheral participation, simply translated, as it’s ok not to know or you can learn on the job, acts as a fundamental declaration of engagement.

It strikes me that legitimate peripheral participation could be said to be a cornerstone of all of our open design communities. Its central tenet, that you will grow closer to the core of the community and therefore more adept are you the more you participate in its activity, is the driving philosophy of all of these open communities. Eric Meyer and Ray Land (2003) posit that in order to move closer to the centre of a community you must engage with a threshold concept; once mastered, it is transformative in that you cross a threshold from which you can’t return. Unfortunately coming from a craft background I am not sure I buy this! Things take time to master, skills need to be practiced, tools to be used again and again. Meyer and Land describe this process as troublesome knowledge, ideas that you need to really work through to get to grips with. Seeley Brown goes on to suggest that the last thing we need is a change of attitude, we need to be “listening with humility and an open mind”. So a return to this word “open”, we can overcome any obstacle, however troublesome, if we join a community and work our way into its centre through being open and listening to each other.

It is this mix of practice makes perfect, openness, attitude and humility that links all of the open design communities. 

Community and Craft in Fixperts

There seem to be two divergent strands in our open design communities, one group advances the idea of an intellectual connoisseurship, where-in the outcome may look rough around the edges but the positioning of the activity is a coherent manifestation of critical design. Monterzino’s ark is hewn from scrap but the idea is of a higher order, Fixperts and Faraworkshop both rely on an integrity of craft and skill and a lithe design awareness and fundamental all encompassing philosophy.  Whereas Sugru, How Do and Be Kind Rewind/Sweding revel in amateurism, in the ad hoc and the improvisational spirit in all of us.

What I find particularly interesting about Fixperts is the make up of the community and the attitude to solving the fixpartner’s problem. The challenge is solved through a mixture of empathy and ingenuity. Solutions may look ad-hoc or clumsy but in reality they have been built in a true user centred co-design spirit, with a strong sense of the improvisational ‘make do and mend’ ethos that requires little or no budget, the idea is to fix not buy. You only have to look at the fixfilms to witness how the fixperts are applying academically trained skills to the everyday in a way not envisioned by most of their courses. This might be only a temporary step, other forces may drive the designers to find design jobs in consultancies, Fixperts might act like a philosophical design gap year, many of the fixperts may enter the system at a later stage in their careers, but the ethical position will be something that they carry forward with them, bringing an open, community participatory attitude into new commercial design contexts.

Helping Harold, one of Fixperts' benefactors.  See the fixfilm here.

This can only be a good thing. It is possible that the next generation of designers with this more empathetic world view will start to effect the system from within, to approach a design problem with the user or the community as a fundamental prerequisite would be a paradigm shift in design. For the record my favourite fixfilm is the one of Harold who is elderly and suffers from arthritis.  This means that he can’t see into his low fridge - so the fixperts simply build a plinth for it to stand on! Ok, so it’s dead simple and quick to do, but how many of us would think to just raise the fridge. I also enjoy the video of the designers to quote Seeley Brown “listening with humility” to Harold’s needs and their obvious enjoyment in his positive response to their initiatives. It’s a direct provocation to the ever-present brand think; we are so wedded to the idea of product obscelence that our instinct is almost always to replace.

Open Communities: The Faraworkshop, London

The Faraworkshop also uses skill as a tool for delivery of a strongly ethical message. Faraworkshop is a social enterprise, which supports FARA, a Romanian charity that previously took donated clothes and traded their bulk value for cash. That was until a group of enterprising fashion and textiles designers proposed that the clothing could be customised and up-cycled for a greater return. A real eye for fashion enhances the ethical positioning. The clothes produced at the Faraworkshop on London’s Pentonville road, are beautifully hand crafted in the shop, they offer a first step experience for new designers, a range of classes for budding amateur fashion designers and most importantly afford the charity a greater return and the charity shopper clothes that are both unique, elegant and fashionable. As with Fixperts the sense of connoisseurship is used with wit and intelligence to create a resonant collection and the community that is growing out of the endeavour is really exciting, fulfilling Lave and Wenger's legitimate peripheral participation prophecies.

Open Communities: Sugru 

The phenomenal wonder material Sugru attracts its own community of fervent makers. Spared on by their mission statement the future needs fixing the sugru community turn their hands to just about anything, from the ubiquitous fixing of Mac cables, to childproofing camera’s and customizing fencing equipment. Sugru positively embraces openness, appealing to the specialist designers and crafters for its amazing properties and to the amateur DIY’ers for its fixing possibilities and to the hackers for its bonding and transformative qualities. The Sugru community welcomes everyone; the only prerequisite is a curiosity around fixing. What Sugru get really right is their pitch to whoever is listening. This is a material that can do pretty much anything, no skill required, form it between your fingers and shove it in or on. Then show us what you did, post it on our site, and show others. The transformation from wonder material to social media community is Sugru’s hidden property. When B&Q placed a 3-month trial order for Sugru, its inventor Jane Ní Dhulchaointigh appealed directly to its online community via a YouTube advert to get your ass down to B&Q and buy Sugru there. To be able to communicate directly to your user community and enlist their help in spreading the word is a brilliant conceit and one, which blurs the boundary between whether Sugru is a product, a community or a movement! Sugru have explored this question themselves, resulting in The Fixers Manifesto, inspired by Platform 21’s Repair Manifesto, amongst its proclamations are;

"If it’s broken fix it. Because everyday practical problem solving is the most beautiful form of creativity there is."

And my favorite

"Nurture your curiosity. Keep trying things you’ve never tried before. Its good for your brain and your soul. Don’t be afraid to fail – it makes success all the sweeter."

Open Communities: Be Kind Rewind

Probably my favourite example of an open community that is truly open and beyond any sort of central control is Sweding. Inspired by the film Be Kind Rewind (2008) is a gentle comedy directed by Michel Gondry. The film’s absurd conceit is that Jack Black is magnetised and wipes all the videotapes whilst his friend Mos Def is left in sole responsibility of the local video store. The two friends decide to re-make any videos requested by customers themselves using a video camera, Sellotape and their imagination.  Films are sent to be ‘sweded’ (in Sweden of course) and the resultant celebration of lo-fi ingenuity, daring do and sheer chutzpah is one of the most affirming movies about the power of the hand and its ability to bring a community together. The hero’s ambition grows in time with films such as Ghostbusters, Driving Miss Daisy, 2001 Space Odyssey, Boys in the Hood, Rush Hour II and Rumble in the Jungle.  Yet as funny as the movie is, no one could predict what followed. Friends began to ‘swede’ their own versions of Jurassic Park, Terminator and Ghostbusters. A viral YouTube community has grown out of an absurd sweet comedy! The communities’ values reside in a low-tech poetic approach to the Hollywood canon, as the traditional gravity of the film set is replaced by freeform creative interpretation and sardonic critique of outlandish plots. There are now ‘sweding’ festivals such as Swede Fest where films receive previews to critical acclaim and a recent Guardian article told us “studios can't decide whether they are terrified or charmed by the trend”. (Walters 2012) 

Be Kind Rewind (2008) Michel Gondry.  Image: IMPA

Some Final Thoughts on Communities and Open Design

Seeley Brown talks about learning as being about the acquisition of tacit knowledge and the unleashing productive enquiry, which he claims is achieved through leveraging the resources of the Internet.  Most of the examples above achieve this, but there are other noteworthy exemplars.  Kickstarter is the ultimate example of support for the underdog through crowd sourced funding.  Kickstarter claims to be the world’s largest funding platform for creative projects, a sort of people’s bank for the sort of projects that established funding routes such as banks and venture capitalists just wouldn’t get.  More importantly Kickstarter is built on an ethical engagement philosophy where backers can offer support for projects that they would like to see grow. The creators share their ideas, ask for a bit of help and likeminded individuals pledge support.  When the funding threshold is crossed then cash is delivered. 

Architecture for Humanity is a network that creates architectural solutions for situations of extreme need such as war or natural disaster. The organisation is non-profit, and has 58 chapters in 16 countries, working in a field it describes as humanitarian design. Its aim is to share architectural solutions that are scalable, not in a one-size-fits-all model but in a way that is customisable (hackable?) to a specific context or need. With their mission statement ‘design like you give a damn!’ Architecture for Humanity brings architects, project managers, builders, policy makers and other important participants into a global network. Founders Cameron Sinclair and Kate Stohr believe architects have the skills and sensibilities to offer a solution in times of great need.  The organisation’s website allows supporters to make charitable donations and offer support in events or disasters that spike the public consciousness.

Open design means you’re open towards the user, that you open yourself to the user, not by conducting market research and so on, but by being open to people, by giving people something to do, by interacting, by not planning everything down to the last detail. Renny Ramakers (2011)

So where has this journey into the open taken us? Ultimately the design world needs to recognise that open design communities are here to stay, that they willgrow in power and will be both politically and socially influential. We as designers need to recognise that the traditional commercial paradigm of industry is now defunct. Fledgling designers are interested in new modes of engagement and as such we need to re-think our roles and re-align our design philosophies. We cannot rely on our old methodologies of practice; it is no longer true that we know best. Our future design practice relies on us developing the correct skill set, we need to listen to our community, recognising that the community will be made up of a diverse interest group who all have something to contribute and we need to share in the most engaged, open and considerate way possible. Lets leave the last word to John Thackara:

‘openness, in short, is more than a commercial and cultural issue, it is a matter of survival’ (Thackara 2011).

About the Author 

Anthony Quinn is the creative director of Aestheticodes, a new design technology consultancy committed to putting the human into Computer Human Interaction. He is Professor of Form at Bergen Academy of Art & Design in Norway and a Senior Lecturer on BA Ceramic Design at Central Saint Martins.

Bibliography

Antonelli, Paola, 'States of Design 04: Critical Design' https://www.domusweb.it/en/design/2011/08/31/states-of-design-04-critical-design.html

Borda-Pedreira, J & Steinsvag, G (eds.) Materaility Matters Documents on Contemporary Crafts. Norwegian Crafts, Oslo.

Knott, S. (2014) Its Not Perfect, but Very Good – Technology and Craft.

Kadushin, R. (2011) Open Design Now, Why Design Cannot Remain Exclusive. Pg 112.  BIS publishers

Lave, J & Wenger, E (1991) Situated Learning, legitimate peripheral participation. Cambridge University Press

Meyer, J & Land, R. (2003) Threshold Concepts and Troublesome Knowledge: Linkages to Ways of Thinking and Practising within the Disciplines. ETL Project, Universities of Edinburgh, Coventry and Durham.

Ramakers, R. (2011) Open Design Now, Why Design Cannot Remain Exclusive. Pg 129.  BIS publishers.

Seely Brown, Jon Learning in the Digital Age Indiana University, April 2009 http://www.johnseelybrown.com/learning2.pdf

Thackara, J. (2011) Open Design Now, Why Design Cannot Remain Exclusive. Pg 44.  BIS publishers

Walters, Ben, 'Sweded movies: The End of Hollywood as We Know it? The Guardian, Thursday 5 July 2012 http://www.theguardian.com/film/2012/jul/05/sweded-movies-end-of-hollywood

The problem with using the word ‘fix’ is that it implies the subject of the necessary fixing is broken. Despite a dictionary definition of ‘fix’ being to ‘put back into working order’ and that is what Tomorrow’s Past do, it still feels inappropriate. 

To fix is to patch up or remove defects; to try, though it’s arguably hardly possible, to reverse the hands of time and blend a repaired element into the body of the whole. A recent revived interest in the role of the hand however, has meant that designers no longer attempt to mask work done but to highlight it. They attempt to bring to the object in need of mending a sense of designer self-importance; ‘I am a designer, look what I have done, see how I have repaired this object.’ Tomorrow’s Past do not play this game. 

The problem with this ‘designer fixing’ is that the aesthetics of the repair begin to take centre stage. A viewer’s impression of the totality, is diminished (or less negatively, changed) by the brashness of a single component. That is not to suggest that there is no evidence of the binder’s aesthetic style in Tomorrow’s Pasts books, but that that style is tempered to the existing thing and does not detract from the entirety. Furthermore, that applied style comes second and only once the function of the book is returned.  

The ‘Repair Aesthetic’ 

Perhaps it would be useful to look at two contemporary objects which have a ‘repair aesthetic’; that is, show evidence of damage which the maker has sought to restore. Let us take Kathy Abbott’s Q. Haratti Flacci Carmina Expurgata by Josepho Juvencio (1784), 2013 on show in Readable Objects and Susan Collis’s, The Oyster’s our World, 2004. 

Kathy Abbott, Q. Haratti Flacci Carmina Expurgata, Josepho Juvencio (1784), 2011. Hand gilded hand-made paper, hand dyed alum tawed thongs, linen thread. 173 x 97 x 46mm. Photography by John Hammond.

Susan Collis, The Oyster’s our World, 2004. Wooden stepladder, mother of pearl, shell, coral, fresh water pearl, cultured pearls, white opal, diamond. 813 x 380 x 580 mm. Courtesy Seventeen Gallery 

Abbott takes a ‘Kintsugi’ approach to restoration. In the Japanese conservation technique, areas of damaged pottery are filled with resin and sprinkled with powdered gold, as a means of a visually pleasing patch up. In Q. Haratti, the temperature of the gold infill matches tunefully with the original boards and thus does not takeaway from the general impression. 

Opposed to this is Collis who tricks her viewer into thinking an everyday object is in a state of disrepair. A paint splattered wooden stepladder has not been accidentally dripped upon but is painstaking inlaid with mother of pearl. Collis is interested in the change in reaction that occurs when a viewer realises the ‘splashes’ are contrived. Again, tonal similarities between gloss paint and mother of pearl do not give away this deception. 

Where Abbott strives to unify a repair with the object, Collis manufactures a repair on an unspoiled article. Both show us they see the repair of damage, whether it be accidental (Abbott) or made (Collis) as something to be both looked at and overlooked. 

Abbot and Collis work with an acute understanding and sensitivity to the needs of the object. Their selection of infill materials, whose hues match so seamlessly with the whole and whose treatment is so easily overlooked (surely a credit to their finesse of hand) offer an exciting viewpoint in a conversation about contemporary fixing. 

This seems to be leading us towards saying a contemporary repair must be aesthetically deceitful. Overlooking the labour involved in these artefacts is easily done, so can we take this a step further and pitch these two at loggerheads with ‘designer repairers’? Not quite, because each camp is driven by a separate set of principles.

Repairing in the Now

Tomorrow’s Past is very clear that the work its binders do must locate the binding in the now. A book ready for repair which was printed in 1853 should be conserved with a contemporary eye. Core member Jen Lindsay writes, ‘We must cease to make facsimiles of inappropriate historical ‘styles’, and we should use modern conservation materials, methods and protocols to respond in a thoughtful and principled manner to the individual needs of the book. Only in this way will the integrity of the book, and of the bookbinder, be respected and sustained.’ 

As such, members work hard not to create deceitful copies or imitate antiquarian style in their bindings. It should be said however, that each constituent is highly skilled in the art of fine bookbinding conservation and many, like Charles Gledhill, work in this way as their profession. This is an important factor for this argument - their refusal to just duplicate, even though they indisputably can - has caused the group to be shunned by antiquarian bookbinders and dealers. 

Conservation convention says that one ought to bind a book in the common style of its years printing; to attempt to turn back time and restore the tome to its former glory. Unfortunately this implies that to update a book, to create perhaps a material or technical disconnect between text block, endpapers and boards (as would reasonably occur when binding a book 200 years after its printing), would mean to not do a ‘good’ repair job.  I put good in inverted commas there, as the ‘goodness’ of a thing is entirely subjective. Speaking in antiquarian terms, to actively allow for a detachment of old from new, is not accurate preservation and therefore ‘bad’.

Jen Lindsay, Certain Sermons or Homilies Appointed to be Read in Churches (1673) 2013. Sewn on five linen cords with 25/2 linen thread, alum tawed goatskin. 340 x 200 x 35mm. Photography by Prudence Cuming Associates Ltd

A very nice counter argument to this is Certain Sermons or Homilies Appointed to be Read in Churches (1673), from 2013 by Jen Lindsay.  Lindsay discovered this damaged debound book which had suffered biopredation (when pages are degraded by natural matter) in an Antiquarian bookshop in London. Her process was to halt any further damage to the pages and to give it new endpapers, fly-leaves and contemporary cover. The pairing of pale alum-tawed goatskin and neutral linen cords offer a quiet nod to an antiquarian aesthetic with its series of parallel ridges down the spine. It is a fitting surprise then that Lindsay says her approach to this contemporary binding was stimulated in part by the revivification of the Neues Museum by David Chipperfield Architects in Berlin between 1997 - 2009. Chipperfield’s intentions when preserving the WWI bomb damaged museum were to ‘reflect the loss without imitating it’. This seems apt here. 

Lindsay’s restoration not only returns the book to function and protects it but transforms repaired thing into a simply beautiful object. The strength of an argument for Tomorrow’s Pasts’ endeavour is surely summarized by this case study. 

Readable Objectsat The Aram Gallery 2013, installation view. Photography by Christina Theisen

About the Aram Gallery:

The Aram Gallery, the central London gallery who hosts the exhibition Readable Objects, is fascinated by this approach. To come across a group of like-minded individuals who push at the restrictive boundaries of their profession to experiment in mending is an excellent match for us. It is hoped that in putting on this exhibition our wide-ranging design audience will have their eyes opened to Tomorrow’s Past’s conservation approach as a valuable chapter in the ongoing dialogue about contemporary fixing. 

Héloïse Parke is curator of The Aram Gallery, London. 

Readable Objects is open until 17th January 2014 

outofbinding.com

To our even further surprise, of the 19 who came 18 decided to join. Word got out in school and three days later there were 32 students who wanted to take part. Crazy! There is no doubt that from the point of view of education, Fixperts is the kind of really delicious candy: a project with a strong social aim and inclusive process that blends the responsibility of dealing with a user directly affected by a problem with the responsibility of creating a fully functional object to solve that problem. 

Point 2: Fixperts is a project that works by great mixing students from different classes, ages and disciplines. We started working in a conventional classroom, every Friday from three to six pm and with 30 participants from different courses and disciplines: a combination of first, third year and,former design students together with engineering students interested in graphic design or specializing in product design and other first year students who had not decided yet on their specialism. The first major Fixperts task is to find a Fixpartner. This process can be the easiest and fastest part of the project or the most complicated and tedious. Searching amongst our community’s closest friends and family reduces the risk of dropping out. We all have a relative, a friend or nephew of a former girlfriend's grandfather who has a problem. In fact, we all have tonnes of problems with which we live from day to day.  The challenge here is to learn to read and analyse them.

Point 3: It is interesting bringing outside professionals to explain their experiences to complement information teachers may not be able to provide. The issue of recording and assembling the final video was one of ours.

Three Fridays later, with 12 participants less thanks to the final exams, and after an interesting talk in class with Barjau Caterina, a photographer and cinematographer specialised in documentaries, we all had a Fixpartner. Point 4: It is important to record each of the stages you go through in this initial process. In some cases the fixperts did not record their first talks with their Fixpartner or keep their initial sketches, and in the end they missed these. Organized in groups of 2 or 3 students and with the introductions of each Fixpartner done, we started developing conceptual mind maps, to analyse the problems of each character and start seeing the different ways in which Fixpartners solve or prevent the problems that hinders their day.

We didn’t design for two weeks. From what is needed at this point was to analyse, understand and empathise.

Point 5: Even more important than what or how the process is being recorded, whether it is by camera, video camera, iPhone or Super 8, is that it has to be recorded HORIZONTALLY. Although this might seem obvious, we promise it is not so.

Once we had analysed and internalized every problem, it was time to start proposing solutions. In each workshop we looked at strong and weak points of the projects and found ways to solve those individually. Pens, pencils, scissors, cardboards, prototypes and various objects began to appear in class.

Point 6: In a project like this it is essential to have an end date. Otherwise , curiosity would drag it on for ever. In our case, before beginning we knew that the project had to be completed for July 6 as we were we presenting it with fixperts co-founder Daniel Charny at the International Open Design Conference in Barcelona. The final stretch was the hardest. Although we had a joint session each week, it was important that the members developed from week to week and it was also important to be visit the Fixpartner to take notes, make questions and propose solutions. For the students it wasn’t easy to take time off or find the time to develop the project. It was important to keep patient and keep working, understanding and proving that football coaching really does help managing classes and motivating teams be it in sports or in the design world.

Point 7: This point in the project is a good time to invite another external professional to give another point of view other. In this case we were honoured to have the presence of the product designer Jordi Canudas . Gracies Jordi!

And that's it! Once the storm had passed and proposals began to take shape, it was time to hit the workshop. Luckily Elisava has a very well-equipped workshop for the design and production of small scale objects . Discarding the first ideas, and aiming towards a much clearer and ever-closer horizon, the students began to enjoy the project and their first results showed it. As if by magic, the participants began to play with their hands, building the first prototypes, cutting, gluing, drilling, finding materials, throwing away failed tests. They became fully autonomous, self-motivated, creative - suddenly, they become real FIXPERTS. Now we just had to record the delivery of objects to each Fixpartner and capture the simple gesture of a smile, to confirm that what we had done was worthy of everyone’s time. The best thing about fixperts is that it is rewarded with a smile. Point 8: Although people say that making a documentary video is easy and that everyone has the right tools for it, it’s not actually like that. Most of our design students had neither the tools nor the experience or knowledge necessary to develop this process, which is completely understandable. This is where one realises that someone in the film industry is needed to ensure a good project, even at an amateur level, for all the documentation , script writing, editing and art direction involved.

The night before the presentation at Open Design, some videos hadn’t arrived, others were in a portrait format, we had Fixpartners who had not been able to be recorded with the final object, no opening titles, videos that were too big to send via dropbox, etc. Finally, at 3 am we decided to create a joint presentation in which rather than present specific projects, we would explain the development of the workshop. It worked! It was a success! Daniel was happy = We were happy!

July 6. Barcelona, heat, holidays in sight, festivals, beach, traveling, summer. As a reward for how happy we are and to thank all the students for their effort and dedication, we decided to delay the delivery of the videos until late August, with the intention of uploading them in September.

Point 9: Error! Do not leave for tomorrow what you can finish today ... October 11, 2013. 7 months later we uploaded the 7 projects made by the students of Elisava. An unforgettable experience incredible pleasure and an honour to have shared these months with such wonderful people. We hope you like and enjoy them. Point 10: Long live to Fixperts!

Marc and Diego are design tutors at Elisava, Barcelona School of Design and Engineering (http://www.elisava.net/en)

Marc Ligos (www.marcligos.com) is a “multitasking” designer who works as theoretical and conceptual researcher, teacher and curator for companies, design institutions and schools.

The British government responded firmly. It enacted the death penalty for machine sabotage, drafted the British army, sending soldiers for bitterly violent battles. It took approximately two years for the government to overpower the Luddites, during which more soldiers fought the Luddites than in the Napoleon war in Spain, dozens were injured and detained, 10 people were executed and 25 deported to Australia.

Some history books present Luddites as violent thugs opposing technological innovations. Edward P. Thompson, a historian of the period, claims otherwise. According to him, such a presentation is mistaken. In his book, The Making of the English Working Class(1963), he claims Luddites were not opposed to technology itself, but protested against the new economic policy, the "free market". Luddites were angered by the rising unemployment, the enslaving of women and children forced to leave home for underpaid work, forcing families to move to industrial cities, the general lowering of the standard of living and the increased mortality. If Thompson is right, the protest was the first organized opposition to capitalism, the first time the working class expressed a political voice. This probably was the first time that a government used its power to protect the economic system. It protected the interests of factory owners, and showed no concern for those of the fired artisans. Sounds familiar, doesn't it?

Asaf Agranat, 2012.

2012

During the past 201 years, not much of the Luddites story, at least as inspiration protest, has remained. Today, "Luddite" serves as a nickname for someone who opposes technological innovations, often uttered disparagingly, indicating a kind of ridiculous resistance, with a non-effective effect and a close expiration date. Except for a few successors, American contemporary opponents of technology innovations, who call themselves neo-Luddites, we gave up a long time ago: Industry progresses rapidly and increasingly continues to produce low quality objects for an over-saturated object-culture, like salty industrial popcorn in an enormous Chinese microwave.

This product inflation is a clear strategy of late capitalism, in evidence for the last seventy years or so. This type of capitalism is characterized by the rising power of global corporations and a culture of increased consumption. Critics from the left  condemn it, pointing out incremental increases in poverty and inequality and propose socialist alternatives. The criticism is acute. It pinpoints the destructive relationship between money and power, removes dust from the concept of justice and reminds us that it could different. But unfortunately, except for some minor "cosmetic" legislation repairs here and there, it often fails to achieve significant results. It seems that the current economy is too powerful, and is here to stay. Still, a new approach to resistance is emerging, which is of a very different kind. To understand this we must have a look into a "deeper" layer from which capitalism draws its daily power. I mean the product layer.

Today, leading companies are selling us products with "built-in-obsolescence". It is an industry-accepted professional term that describes a manufacturer's strategy of predesigning a product so that it stops functioning after a specified period of time, in order to make the customer purchase a new one instead. In other words,  it is a key method for encouraging consumption.

There are two methods to create a built-in-obsolescence, according to the culture critic Vance Packard. In his book from 1960, The Waste Makers, he named one of them "obsolescence-of-function", which practically means that the product stops functioning after a pre-calculated amount of time. One way to do this is to use poor quality materials, e.g. in an electric stove, low quality "stainless steel" rusts gradually, until one has to throw away the device, even if the heater still works. A second way is to prevent customers or even skilled professionals from reaching the internal electronic components and fixing them, e.g., by assembling to parts of a plastic hair dryer with adhesives instead of screws. Sometimes electronic components installed on the device will be of low quality or loosely assembled, promising dysfunctionality after some movements. A mark of an "expiration date", which usually lacks substantial justification, is another reason to throw away the device. As parents know full well, the expiration date is to be found on nearly everything they buy, from pacifiers to activity mats and car seats. This "expiration date" will ensure that parents do not keep the product for their next child or do not pass it on to another. A third way is comparing the price of repairing to that of buying a new product, so fixing, even if possible, if not economical. Obsolescence-of-function ensures that the client will have no alternative but to throw away the entire product.

IKEA – the world's most popular network home furnishing, boasting fine design products at a low price - champions obsolescence-of-function. Their products looks durable on display, but a considerable number of them do not last more than one or two years. Unfortunately, it is not this company’s only "design sin". A substantial portion of its products are copied from designers, especially Europeans, one by one.

Even Apple, who’s excellent design is a continuous mythology happening in the present, designs for built-in-obsolescence. How else is it possible to explain the world's best computer company designs battery chargers with a shorter lifespan than the computers it charges?

A second method to create "built-in obsolescence" belongs to the field of psychology, and is called by Packard "obsolescence-of-desirability". This strategy seeks to create the feeling that a product purchased just recently is out of fashion. This limitation will make the client stop using the product and discard it, even if it is working properly. To bring about this sophisticated obsolescence, design divisions work together in orchestral cooperation with marketing divisions, to create new styles rapidly. Here too Apple "shines". It releases a new product every year, even if there is no real reason - a technological innovation or change of materials - and together with strong media "hype" it makes sure its customers will desire to "upgrade". With obsolescence-of-desirability the term "season" reaches from clothing to housewares. There is nothing seasonal in a dish, until it comes to encouraging consumption.

Therefore, those who oppose "consumer culture" should make clear distinctions: Sometimes manufacturers give their customers no choice - the product does not work. Sometimes, they use sophisticated psychological manipulations. Perhaps one day the warrior-director Michael Moore will prove that considerable parts of the propaganda campaign against "consumerism" are in fact a U.S. government conspiracy designed to hide the real problem: manufacturers’ policies making Capitalism grotesque. Of course, this brief description falls short of describing the devastating effects built-in obsolescence has on the environment: more products means increased consumption of fossil fuel for production and transport, resulting in pollution of air, soil and water.

If it's so obvious, why do the governments not banish this strategy? Answer: because it is good for them. The International Comparative index of the level of development of countries, GDP (Gross Domestic Product), is a term expressing the total final goods and services produced in a given year within a nation's economy. The term includes the income of foreign production factors by their activities within the country. GDP measures the economy's ability to produce. In a simple language: the more production and consumption there is, the more the increase in the country’s value. Clearly then, built-in-obsolescence is a strategy of manufacturers supported by governments. It "drives the wheels of the economy" and thus increases the measured value of one country in relation to others.

If this discussion appears to be dealing with a low-level or an esoteric practice of capitalism, since it is just about design, and not about government legislation, the presentation of an alternative theory or an ethical debate, it is not. This design strategy sneaks capitalism in through the back door. Even if countries will increase GDP in other ways, it will be difficult to enact laws to stop manufacturers from producing products with built-in obsolescence. Not all designing and manufacturing methods are traceable, and the manufacturers are experts in what is not. This strategy hides the real agenda of the drivers of the economy – "Produce more! Buy more!" – under the plastic cover of your blender.

The New Revolution

I want to suggest that FIXPERTS, as a Non-Profit Organization requesting designers to be "experts" in repair or improving products for people who can't do it themselves, is a new form of resisting the dominant design strategy that might be effective. The organization is one of a series of similar initiatives in recent years in:

IFIXIT is a website which offers tutorials for repairing electronic devices,from a camera to a car. If you do not find a solution to the malfunctioning device, you can ask for advice on the website, and someone might help you solve it. You can also help others. REPAIR CAFE is an American organization which conducts live sessions of repairing all types of products, and offers help setting up branches of similar groups nationwide. COLLECTIVE NYC FIXERS is an organization whose declared purpose is to fight built-in-obsolescence. Members meet once a month and call people to bring their broken products for repair.

Here are some especially interesting points for the FIXPERTS manifest:

3) Give your products a longer life. If we double the life of our posessions, we halve what goes into landfill.

4) Fixing means freedom and independence. As a fixer, you don't need to worry about wear and tear. Nothing stays new, so forget perfection.

5) Resist trends and needless upgrades. They fuel our throwaway culture.

6) Don't let companies treat you as a passive consumer. Every time we spend money, we vote for the kinds of products we want to see succeed. Buy products that can be repaired.

FIXPERTS, together with organizations similar to it, offers an opportunity to reject the automatic acceptance of the dominant paradigm, together with all the problems it creates. FIXPERTS’ invocation is particularly interesting because it explicitly addresses designers. As we have seen, in the logic of late capitalism, designers are a necessary element in enhancing consumption. Without them, there is no ability to make desirable products obsolete during limited amount of time, since both the physical and the psychological aspects of it are based on their work. FIXPERTS’ call is therefore revolutionary. They ask those who were trained into this paradigm to resist it materially: instead of designing short-life-span products, taking a role of product-doctors extending and bettering products’ life. This means resisting the logic of the current economic system.

Actually, FIXPERTS is a kind of reverse Luddism. The Luddites were professionals protesting against early capitalism by destroying machines; FIXPERTS are professionals protesting against late capitalism by repairing products. Both of these grassroots movements refuse to cooperate with the existing economic order. Although FIXPERTS as well as Luddites seem to have no pretensions to replace the economic model with another, it seems that their actions might undermine the solid foundations of the economy, with a modus of subversive activity.

More important than similarities, are the differences between the two movements: the textile workers in early industrial revolution were made redundant by the machines that replaced them. Contemporary designers, however, understand that machines can't replace them - artificial intelligence that can translate human volitions and desires into three dimensional objects, has not yet invented by science. Consumer revolution alone will not be able to overcome the system, partly because many of the largest companies’ products are manufactured with built-in-obsolescence, and do not leave the customer a better alternative for a purchase, and because it is usually not possible to distinguish between products that have built-in-obsolescence from those that don't. Designers realize that they are the only ones who can break the paradigm of the inherent limitations and uproot increased consumption.

Another difference is the motivation of the movements. Luddite opposition to capitalism resulted from the destruction of social and family life. These issues are not of interest to the FIXPERTS, who grow up into a honey-world of bourgeois comfort. What bothers them is the destruction of the planet, increased utilization of renewable resources and the rising pollution causing gradual extinction of life on Earth.

The Luddites failed decisively. The FIXPERTS might have a brighter future: as built-in-obsolescence is difficult to locate and stop, so it is impossible to prohibit fixing. There's nothing violent in it, and it does not require more than the will of a designer to take part in the idea and its execution. Maybe that's why FIXPERTS do not declare themselves revolutionaries. Over 201 years capitalism has gradually become much more sophisticated, much quieter and well hidden in the mechanisms of production and consumption. So must be the revolution.

Bibliography:

Packard, Vance; The waste makers. Brooklyn: Ig Pub (2011 [1960])

Thompson, E. P.; The Making of the English Working Class (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books, (1980 [1968])

Things break. That is a fact. While this can be due to “wear and tear”, human flaw or even planned obsolescence, what if the problem is something not tangible, not made of a “material” thing? What if the problem is a feeling made of a combination of broken things?

In the past two years of my life, I’ve been working on a project called “Repair is Beautiful”, which started during my MA in Industrial Design at Central Saint Martins.  Before that, I used to work with stop-motion animation as a sculptor model-maker for films such as Wes Anderson’s Fantastic Mr. Fox and Tim Burton’s Frankenwennie.  Before that, I did illustration, BA Fine Arts in Brazil and so on... so making things and improvising is something that I’ve been doing ever since I was a child, repairing my broken GI Joe’s.

In 2008 the financial crisis started in US. It affected everybody at different levels and intensity.  I got unemployed for a whole year. This created a strong feeling of frustration and that became the original inspiration for my final MA project. Can I repair a broken feeling, such as frustration?

So I started to reverse engineering my problem, which at first looked very simple, but simplicity and complexity often mask each other.

The causes of my frustration were an unintended consequence of a collection of solutions intended to solve a problem inside an extremely complex system ( in this case the financial system). I was frustrated because I was powerless when faced with such an immense problem; I had no control over the results of it and no effective solution to deal with the new situation. To try to understand what was broken, I started to research systems and I began to realise that similar problems that create a domino effect inside the financial structure, could also be found in a coffee machine at the university and other everyday things, because of the way we organise our social, economic, transport and other systems around us.

A complex system is made of many parts (e.g. people, institutions, financial system, a combination of all, etc…) that each somehow interact and affect each other. Once something goes wrong inside a complex system, it is really difficult to locate the problem. Then, when or if it is found, sometimes it isn't possible to remove the broken part because the whole system might collapse, so the solution is to work around the problem, by creating new connections and building new bridges between the parts, keeping this fragile complex system in balance.

During my research on my MA I came across, a few authors such as E.F. Schumacher, David Pye, Richard Sennett among others, who influenced my response towards my problem. Schumacher says that growth and efficiency are the main concerns of our economic system, and technology is the major tool to achieve these goals. Instead, Schumacher proposed taking technology back to real needs and ‘actual size of man. Man is small, and, therefore, small is beautiful’. (Small is Beautiful: Impressions of Fritz Schumacher, 1978, 9 minutes).

The full title of my project is: “Repair is Beautiful – Homo Faber and the broken things”. The term homo faber means “man-the-maker" and in my project, the term stands for values of craftsmanship, empowerment of the individual and resourcefulness. This homo faber persona, with their hands-on approach and use of human ingenuity and creativity, tries to control this uncontrollable and complex scenario, of financial crisis. This leads to neurotic behaviour seen in the design of over repaired objects that reflect their environment. Repair and craftsmanship play a crucial role in balancing idealism with practicality by showing an alternative that is not better, just different.

Apart from the conceptual aspects mentioned before, what led the motivation to create from these pieces was a desire for the celebration of repair, the empowerment of craftsmanship and the attempt to get the feeling of control back in my own hands. I was inspired by Schumacher’s idea of scaling things down, by Bruno Latour’s discussions of the power negotiation between man and technology and Pye’s view of the nature of workmanship, and combined their views with my own frustration of being completely powerless when faced by the small scale consequences of financial crisis.

In a very practical sense, I developed a repair methodology based on scaling down the complex broken system, projecting it into broken objects that I can put my hands on and repair by applying unintended consequences in the repair process. By doing so I found a way to deal with my frustration, as repairing broken objects using elements of this broken system has created intriguing new objects that talk about the absurdity of it all. I can’t repair the whole system or social structure and I can’t affect it in the same scale that they affect me, but I can make pieces that reflect the environment that created them and question our society as a whole.

Latour, B. (1992). Where are the missing masses, sociology of a few mundane artefacts. [Internet] Available from: http://www.bruno-latour.fr/node/258. [Accessed 15 April  2012].

Latour, B. (2008). A Cautious Prometheus? A Few Steps Toward a Philosophy of Design (With Special Attention to Peter Sloterdijk [Internet] Available from: http://www.bruno-latour.fr/node/69. [Accessed 5May 2012].

Pye, D. (1968). The Nature and Art of Workmanship. London: The Herbert Press

Sennett, R. (2008). The Craftsman. New Haven: Yale University Press 

Schumacher, E. F. (1973). Small is Beautiful – Economics as if people mattered. 2010 ed. Harper Perennial

Small Is Beautiful: Impressions of Fritz Schumacher (1978) Directed by  Donald Brittain, Barrie Howells and Douglas Kiefer. Canada: NFB . [Internet] Available from: http://www.nfb.ca/film/small_is_beautiful. [Accessed 5May 2012].

A portable bike fixing station was developed for a local bicycle recycling business and used by its owner Nick

Among the 16 practical solutions, three have already been adopted by the fix partners, and received very positive feedback. Many solutions are in the process of being realized.

The students were enthusiastic about the project:

“This project taught me so much. One major thing was being immersed in the entire design process…from meeting the client, setting a goal, to developing a practical final solution. This will be invaluable in the future when needing to design a product from start to finish.”

“Very satisfied that we made a final finished product that we left with our fix partner. It is still working and it looks like there is a good opportunity to make it available to more farmers.”

Daniel Charny, Co Director of Fixperts attended the Brunel Fixperts exhibition on the 18th April 2013

The tutors thought fixperts was a great way of engaging students in problem-solving with people:

“Working with a fix partner, tackling with their specific daily challenges, made students realize the complexity of design and the value of design.  Although many solutions were developed for a specific person, students realized that they could be used by a wider audience – a great way of appreciating inclusive design.”

Brunel First-year Design students worked in teams, and produced 16 fixperts project prototypes and films

As the “first independent Fixperts project” (quote, Daniel Charny), Brunel Fixperts has achieved great success, and we thank all the fix partners and people who have supported the project. We’d also like to share some insights with tutors who plan to run the project in the future:

Briefing stakeholders well in advance, giving them scope to identify fix partners and build trust

Introducing co-design and participatory design tools  and techniques

Introducing ethics and tactics of working with people

Emphasizing practical solutions and outputs, not just conceptual design 

Providing workshop access and facilities for realizing the solution

Providing travel funds if possible (to support working with fix partners)

Introducing film making tips and offering feedback in the interim

Organizing an exhibition for peer review and group input

Students presented their rigs, posters, films and the final solutions at the Brunel Fixperts exhibition  

 What accounted for this enthusiasm? Doubtless, there was an element of good timing. Economic downturns tend to prompt a return to the autonomy and security that people associate with craft. The ever-encroaching world of the digital, similarly, inspires an equal and opposite attraction to solid materiality. Yet I think there was another reason for the success of Power of Making: it was a thoroughly egalitarian space. Objects were shown without any sense of hierarchy. 3D printers were shown alongside traditional dry-stone wall construction, without any implication that one of those technologies was superior to the other. The work of amateur hobbyists mixed freely with that of highly-trained professionals. 

Charny’s approach in Power of Making was a real lesson for me. I have long been suspicious of purely celebratory attitudes to craft, so I did have some misgivings about the simplicity of Charny’s message, which might be summarized: making is good for you, so why not give it a try? That clarity was clearly a big part of the project’s success. But even as I have absorbed that message, for me it was the ‘super flat’ structure of Power of Making that was most influential.

Fix Fix Fix at Gallery SO, 2013. Photo: Sipke Visser

In a recent curatorial side project I attempted a response. Entitled Fix Fix Fix, the show investigated the art of repair, pursuing that theme through an associative chain of thinking.[1]Some of the objects on display were by artists, who had been asked to respond to a brief. The challenge I set was to repair an existing object, prioritizing respect for that thing rather than the expressive opportunity that found objects normally offers an artist. On my part, this was a conscious variation on the “assisted readymade” - I wanted to adhere to a professional standard of repair, which one might call “anti-expressive”. The perfect fix, after all, would restore the broken object to its original state, erasing the evidence of the repair in the process. That is only ever an ideal – even the most skilled restorer cannot turn back time – so fixing is always a matter of approximation. But even so, repair tends to erase itself, all the more so when it is done well.

With these thoughts in mind, alongside the commissioned art works in Fix Fix Fix I introduced several everyday artefacts that marked out positions in the world of repair. This was a direct application of Charny’s method of leveling the playing field. To drive the point home, I decided to withhold identification of the objects from the audience. When viewers encountered a Jeep motor in the middle of the gallery, or a set of nineteenth-century mounts that could be used to repair a piece of French court furniture, or a Japanese porcelain box skillfully mended with lacquer and gold, or the frame of a grand piano hanging in a custom-fabricated steel truss, they were not necessarily aware of the status of these objects. Were these things artworks, or not? I wanted to forestall an answer to that question, in the hope that the question itself would come to seem irrelevant.

  19th century furniture mounts, lent by Arlington Conservation. Photo: Sipke Visser

Furthermore, I wanted to infuse the exhibition with a complex range of emotional tonalities. These were present in Power of Making too, if you looked hard enough, but I think that the smaller scale and tighter focus of Fix Fix Fix yielded a more intense (and possibly contradictory) psychological environment. There was certainly outright celebration in the show – not least in a video made under the aegis of Fixperts. But elsewhere in my show there were other notes struck. That bundle of furniture mounts I mentioned, displayed in a wrapping of paper and string just as I found them in storage at the restoration shop Arlington Conservation, resembled a Dada sculpture. While appropriated (by me, not by an artist) from a non-art context, it was the object in the show that most strongly suggested a Duchampian aesthetic. The Jeep motor, by contrast, evoked the world of the working-class tradesman and also another historical exhibition context, the Museum of Modern Art’s 1934 show Machine Art, which helped to introduce a taste for industrial forms that persists to this day.

   Japanese porcelain box repaired using the Kintsugi method. Photo: Sipke Visser

The porcelain box indexed yet another well-established aesthetic - the reverence shown to precious ceramics in traditional Japanese culture. In that context, an object that has been broken and repaired may actually become more valuable, because a moment in its lifecycle has been enshrined. Hence the gold repair, known in Japan as kintsugi: an accident permanently fixed in a resplendent material. The piano frame, finally, I extracted from a repair project being undertaken by amateur craftsman Steven Probert. He had inherited the instrument, a grand piano made at the turn of the century by well-regarded Boston firm Mason and Hamlin, and over the course of many years has dismantled it and remade it to his own exacting specifications. The lengths to which he has gone to achieve the perfect sound are remarkable – not least, in building a steel A-frame to give himself access to all its surfaces, which he has reworked fastidiously, in-filling each nick, scrape or dent with a custom-fashioned inlay.

   Detail of a piano repair project by Steven Probert.  Photo: Sipke Visser

Walking around Fix Fix Fix once it was finished, I realized that I much preferred these various “non-art” objects over the works I had commissioned: they seemed to me more strange, more aesthetically intense, more provocative. This is not to say that artists cannot achieve all these qualities; just that the world already offers them, if we know where to look. As modest as Fix Fix Fix was in comparison to any V&A show, I feel that it was just as effective in outlining an ecumenical curatorial methodology, in which every object is handled equally. This methodology has become more and more common in recent years, though decorative art curators have certainly not been leading the way. It was specialists in African and Native American art who were among the first to embrace the idea that artifacts should not just be collected and explained, but rather should be given a second life through the mediating act of display. The anthropologist Alfred Gell, for example, was deeply impressed by the exhibition Art/Artifact, curated by Susan Vogel for the Museum for African Art in New York, and particularly her decision to display a hunting net (made by the Zande people of Central Africa) tightly baled and set in the middle of a white cube gallery, looking for all the world as if it were a piece of contemporary art. Gell’s response to this gesture was an article entitled “Vogel’s Net: Traps as Artworks and Artworks as Traps,” which argued for an ecumenical approach in which objects are were shown not according to a pre-existing category (fine art, craft, ethnographic material), but rather their potential to ensnare the audience in a web of interpretative implication. All objects that are “vehicles of complicated ideas,” he wrote, including things like hunting nets that are ostensibly “pragmatic and technical” in nature, could be equally regarded as suitable objects for aesthetic and conceptual interpretation: “I would define as a candidate artwork any object or performance that potentially rewards such scrutiny because it embodies intentionalities that are complex, demanding of attention and perhaps difficult to reconstruct fully.”[2]

Reconditioned Jeep motor on display in Gallery SO.  Photo: Sipke Visser

This idea of the difficult but entrancing object now runs rampant through museums of all kinds. As mentioned above in relation to Power of Making, the early modern cabinet of curiosities has become a common point of reference for curators. Objects are increasingly presented in a way that emphasizes their potential to enchant. This does not necessarily mean doing away with explanation entirely (though it may entail something as radical as that), but it does mean that curators are thinking about the affect of their displays on other registers. Their own craft of exhibition-making is more akin to the performance of a magician than the detailed report of an anthropologist. 

Such currents in museology may be the latest thing but they are also a return to older ways of thinking, which tries to correct for some of the weaknesses of twentieth-century display methods. For most of its history, the avant garde has suffered from a degree of hypocrisy, in that it espouses radical politics while in practice establishing itself as an exclusive elite. Museums that collect and display material culture are equally guilty: they pretend to the values of progressive universal education, but in fact tend to reinscribe existing patterns of power and prestige. The problem that besets both of these approaches is their pretension to neutrality - as if one were gaining direct access to an artist’s ideas or an object’s history. A truly democratic approach to curating will, instead, clearly express its own status as a form of authorship. Curators must recognize that their trade always involves acts of appropriation, in which meaning is ascribed and produced, not merely communicated.

    This post is adapted from Glenn Adamson’s forthcoming essay ‘Handle With Care: Object Encounters in the Museum,’ which will be published in Giorgio Riello, ed., Writing the History of Material Culture (Bloomsbury, forthcoming in 2013).

 [1]Fix Fix Fix was on view at Gallery SO, a small but beautiful brick-walled space (a former mercer’s storehouse, as it happens) in the East End of London, from 14 February to 24 March, 2013. Here I would like to acknowledge the contributions of Christopher Thompson Royds and Felix Flury in the conception and execution of the project, and the many lenders to the exhibition.

 [2]Alfred Gell, “Vogel’s Net: Traps as Artworks and Artworks as Traps,” Journal of Material Culture 1/1 (1996), p. 36, 37; see also Gell, “The Technology of Enchantment and the Enchantment of Technology,” in Jeremy Coote and Anthony Shelton, eds, Anthropology, Art and Aesthetics (Oxford: Clarendon, 1992); and Glenn Adamson, Invention of Craft (London: V&A/Bloomsbury, 2013).

Fixperts taps into a number of contemporary phenomena; from the resurgence of interest in craft to the changing role of the designer and the impact that new technologies are having on all of our involvement in the creative process.  As a design historian interested in contemporary craft and design, particularly forms of practice with a social or ethical agenda, I’d like to kick start things by simply offering five ways of thinking about fixing.

1. Fixing as a Method of Making

In January 2013 the V&A organized a salon that asked the question asked ‘Is Making Back on the Agenda’? The speakers, including Fixpert’s co-founder Daniel Charny all agreed; making is back in fashion.  Signs of this come from across the political and cultural spectrum; from British Chancellor George Osborne’s call for a “March of the Makers” in the 2011 Budget to the V&A’s The Power of Making show, curated by Charny in the same year, that attracted the highest ever number of visitors to a free V&A exhibition since 1950.  Significantly, Power of Making didn’t profile the big hitters of the craft world, but the everyday makers, the amateurs, the riflemaker, the 3D printing tinkerer, the designer getting his hands dirty.  

Makerbot 3D Printer.  Bre Pettis, Adam Mayer, and Zach ‘Hoeken’ Smith, MakerBot Industries.  Photo: V&A

  Making is craft re-configured for the twenty-first century.  According to The Economist we are in a "third industrial revolution" in which the way things are made, and who makes them, is undergoing a seismic shift; a revolution in which making, as a customizable, manual, craft-based activity, will have a central place.  The fundamental human act of fixing fits well into this new manufacturing landscape.  Fixing is not about making the world anew, but modifying what is already there. It takes elements of hacking, tinkering, repair and an imaginative use of the minimum of means available to forge a new – and at the same time centuries old – mode of design and making.

  2. Fixing and Skill

The subtitle of Power of Making was “The Importance of Being Skilled”.  While the exhibition did include traditionally skilled artisans, it was premised on the idea that in today’s mass produced world the age of the master craftsman is gone.  As Charny noted at the V&A salon, we are witnessing either a “Renaissance or a Requiem” or making.  Whichever it is, it goes without saying that in the industrialized West most of us do not earn our crust from making and we do not have a traditional craft-based skill set. We are not in a society of skill, but one of deskill.

  Fixing is the ideal mode for this landscape.  It can be seen as a new skill, a “reskill” to emerge from our irreversibly deskilled condition.  As Emily Campbell, Director of Design at the Royal Society of the Arts, said in 2009 of the rise of hacking: ‘Our competence in making things as individuals, and in manufacturing as a nation, is greatly reduced and unlikely to be restored soon…In the waning of common hand-craft, might we settle for hacking instead?’  Similarly in the decline of designing the new, might fixing the existing, do. 

Blue Footed Bobby.  IKEA Hack and old suitcase by Leel.  Photo: Journal of Modern Craft

Fixing also raises questions about the words we use to describe ideas about craft and skill today.  Charny still sees fixing as a skilled activity; he describes it as "an imaginative use of skill”.  Fixing shares much in common with more traditional forms of making.  Like older forms of craft, it still involves knowledge of materials and tools – albeit a set of knowledge learnt via YouTube rather than an apprenticeship.  

  3. Fixing and Social Engagement

What marks fixing out from other forms of making emerging today is its social orientation.  Fixperts describes itself as a ‘social project’ dedicated to using design to do good. As Fixperts co-founder James Carrigan explains, "The idea behind Fixperts is to connect designers with people who could do with a little help in their lives, from disabled people to the elderly…It's interesting to think what kind of impact a designer can make on somebody's life in about an hour and a half."

Still from Fixperts film by Ben Peppiatt.  Photo: Dezeen

  Amongst the earliest projects was fixing the broken joystick on a young girls’ electric wheelchair.  Not coincidentally they fixed the chair with Sugru, the self-setting rubber invented by Jane ni Dhulchaointigh while a student at the RCA, who since set up a company to sell the ultimate material for a fixing culture, with Carrigan as Creative Director. 

 Sealing shower fixtures with Sugru.  Image: Sugru

  Since starting up Fixperts, Carrigan and Charny have overseen all manner of different projects that are all united by the same ambition of using design to help others.  This is not the first time that designers have turned their attention to serving the needs of society, rather than industry.  Today we are witnessing the re-emergence of the designer as a socially responsible figure, last seen on a wide scale in the 1970s, when Victor Papanek extolled not only the idea that we are all designers, but that designers needed to wake up to their social, ethical and environmental responsibilities.

Victor Papanek, Design for the Real World: Human Ecology and Social Change, first published in 1971.  Source: Domus

  Fixperts isn’t the only example of this today.  As exhibitions such as Design with the Other 90% to movements such as Occupy Design and Adhocracy testify, activism, social engagement, ethically, environmentally and politically driven practice are increasingly driving the design agenda.  As with all of these, Fixperts is of benefit to everyone involved – from the ‘fixpartners’ open to having an aspect of their life improved, to the ‘fixperts’ who’ve sought to improve it.

  4. Fixing and the Role of the Designer

Fixing doesn't just see the designer re-engaging with their social responsibility.  It also brings into focus the designer’s changing role today.  In Fixperts, the designer’s creative faculties have been re-orientated.  They are not dreaming up new products for the marketplace nor necessarily coming up with new objects at all; instead, but they are looking again at what has already been designed and improving it for an individual’s needs. 

  This is the designer as facilitator; opening up the design process and making its possibilities available to all.  Fixperts describes itself as  ‘an open knowledge sharing platform’, echoing the potential of open source software and open source design and architecture, which making designing and producing objects open to all.

OS Mod-bike designed by Jo Van Bostraeten. Photo: Domus

  Fixing also requires the designer to constantly get to grips with the new; to forgo a lengthy design and development process in favour of playing with the unknown, of getting to grips with a problem using only the means available – of taking on the role of the amateur tinkerer rather than the professional studio designer. 

  5. Fixing and the User

Fixperts is not just about new roles for designers, but for users too.  We are living in an age in which the roles between producers and consumers are becoming increasingly blurred; the age of the prosumer.  As Charles Leadbeater and Paul Miller argued in a 2004 Demos report we are in a “Pro-Am Revolution”.  If the 20th century was about the rise of the professional, over the amateur, then the 21st century is about the reversal of this role: “we're witnessing the flowering of Pro-Am, bottom-up self-organisation and the crude, all or nothing, categories of professional or amateur will need to be rethought.”  This blurring of boundaries is evident in design practice; such as Marijn van der Poll’s Do Hit chair for the Dutch design collective Droog, in which users are invited to hammer a metal box into their desired chair shape, therefore involving themselves in the design and making process to create an object that is all theirs.

Marijn van der Poll, Do Hit stainless steel chair, 2000.  Image: Droog.

  Charny describes “Making your own stuff” as another key Fixperts concept.  Fixing does not just make designers into amateurs but amateurs into designers. With its transformative nature, its refusal to accept the world as it is, fixing does not just mean negotiating the material world in a new way, but realising that the material world can be modified, whichever side of the increasingly blurred professional/amateur designer divide you’re on.  Once you’ve been ‘fixed’ then you can fix for yourself, and for others.  Fixperts is an empowering activity for designers and non-alike; it makes fixers out of all of us.