THE REPAIR HEROES
I’ve highlighted individuals and organisations that understand the importance of R2R in the main feature, but there are others:
iFixit
There’s no denying that the R2R movement wouldn’t be as strong without iFixit. Its website began in 2003 as a wiki detailing how anyone could repair certain electrical products. To fund the website, it sold toolkits, repair gadgets and eventually spare parts. Founders Kyle Wiens and Luke Soules became activists, lobbying and influencing world leaders on the importance of R2R and the circular economy. iFixit now has more than 69,000 free manuals for over 32,000 devices and there probably isn’t a repair technician on the planet that doesn’t own an iFixit toolkit – I own two! iFixit’s gadget “teardowns” show how repairable (or not) modern tech really is and has revealed plenty of R2R barriers used by manufacturers.
Jessa Jones
The day her twins put her iPhone into her toilet changed Jessa’s life. She retrieved the phone, but it took another two years of learning microsoldering and logic board diagnostics to fix it. Her company, iPad Rehab, gained a reputation for resurrecting the irreparable and, since 2012, it’s estimated she has repaired more than 10,000 dead iPhones and iPads. She’s a proud advocate for R2R and shares her expertise and experiences at conferences all around the US. Jessa recognised the skills shortages that are barriers to R2R and set up her own training courses, teaching board repair and micro-soldering skills to hundreds of other technicians.
The Restart Project
Restart began in 2013 as a social enterprise that connected repairers with people who needed things mending. It began hosting Restart Parties to which members of the public could bring broken gadgets for repair. These became so popular that they spawned a repair-based festival, Fixfest, held in the UK and in Europe. Restart is also an active R2R campaigner and staff regularly speak at conferences and summits, whilst contributing to parliamentary committees that help to shape legislation. Restart at School is a ten-week programme available to secondary schools aimed at getting students interested in repair and helping to instil the importance of R2R in school life. Restart provides plenty of tools and ideas to help people learn repair skills, including a wiki containing practical tips on how to repair the most common types of gadgets.