The Power of We – Repair Groups
I love to fix things but many people are intimidated by the task or just don’t know where to start. There is a solution, which is to team up with people who enjoy fixing things. There are a surprisingly large number of these, here are just a few.
The Restart Project
“Repair, don’t despair! towards a better relationship with electronics”
The Restart Project are reviewing products for repairability, helping people out are repair parties and even plan to lobby manufacturers to change their products to make them either to repair.
The Restart Project have also been collaborating with the Repair Cafe at the Goodlife Centre.
Remakery Brixton
“A shared workshop, office space and education centre for social and environmental projects focused on re-use.”
Remakery are effectively a hacker space with a focus on material re-use. They aim to keep valuable materials and undervaluded in circulation and encourage businesses to create products and opportunities from waste.
Fixperts
“Fixperts are ingenious, observant flexible thinkers that love making and improving things.”
Fixperts connect experts with people with people with a day to day problem that needs fixing. They then film the fixing and make it available online.
Volunteer it yourself
VIY challenges young people aged 14-17 to learn building and construction skills on the job by fixing local youth club buildings.
The VIY project are into building and training young people. By fixing up youth centres in need of repair they provide communities with new facilities and the people involved with skills that they can then use to get work or as a stepping stone to more advanced training. So far they have completed 3 projects and have another 46 in the pipeline.
iFixIt
iFixit describes itself as “The free repair manual that you can edit”. A kind of Wikipedia of repair, it features guides and FAQs for a range a different devices, with a bit of a bias towards Apple kit.
This blog has been posted for Blog Action Day 2012
— Stop Press —
London Bike Kitchen is an open DIY workshop where you can work on your own bike with guidance and tools supplied.
Metal sculpture in brass, mounted on an 1800s French Coin
There’s also Fixit Clinic in the U.S.: http://www.fixitclinic.org
Thanks Peter, I was focusing mainly on London because that what I know but it’s good to hear other places also have these projects.