Abstract
This chapter describes initial results from an ethnographic study of design and engineering engagements in community-operated sites at which hobbyists mend and repair mass-produced goods. We conducted participant observation at seven repair events and two collectives in the San Francisco Bay area where consumer electronics are reassembled, and spoke with approximately eighty repair practitioners. Here we describe surprising connections between repair and social movements that, in turn, reveal deep ties between contemporary hobbyist repair and countercultural design practices of the 1960s. These links, we argue, open new and important areas for design research.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
Qualitative methods characterize causal processes, recognize new phenomena, present auxiliary evidence for existing hypotheses, and identify counterexamples (Burrell and Toyama 2009). Unlike statistical methods, qualitative methods are good at pinpointing what about people’s lived experiences of repair is important and why (Bauer and Gaskell 2000). Through long-term observation and interviews we can examine why people choose to repair some possessions and discard others, and how certain artifacts achieve heirloom status. We cannot make representative claims, test hypotheses, reveal trends, or answer questions of how often and how much — aims that qualitative methods are ill-suited to address. Instead, we seek to produce “observable-reportable” (Garfinkel and Sacks 1970: 342) understandings of the practical (and practiced) work of repair.
References
Bauer M, Gaskell G (2000) Qualitative researching with text, image and sound. Sage, London, pp 336–350
Brand S (1994) How buildings learn: what happens after they’re built. Penguin, New York
Burrell J (2012) Invisible users: youth in the internet cafés of urban Ghana. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA
Burrell J, Toyama K (2009) What constitutes good ICTD research. Inf Technol Int Dev 5(3):82–94
Crawford MB (2010) Shop class as soulcraft: an inquiry into the value of work. Penguin, New York
Dant T (2010) The work of repair: gesture, emotion and sensual knowledge. Sociol Res Online 15(3):7
Dym M (2013) Interview with Daniela Rosner, 8 August
Fuller RB (1963) Ideas and integrities, a spontaneous autobiographical disclosure. Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs, NJ
Garfinkel H (1967) Studies in ethnomethodology. Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs, NJ
Garfinkel H, Sacks H (1970) On formal structures of practical actions. In: Mckinney JC, Tiryakian EA (eds) Theoretical sociology: perspectives and developments. Appleton, New York, pp 337–366
Graham S, Thrift N (2007) Out of order understanding repair and maintenance. Theory Cult Soc 24(3):1–25
Harper DA (1987) Working knowledge: skill and community in a small shop. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL
Henke CR (1999) The mechanics of workplace order: toward a sociology of repair. Berkeley J Sociol 44:55–81
Ikeahackers (2012) “Forså Camera Stand,” Ikeahackers.Blog. 21 June. http://www.ikeahackers.net/2012/06/forsa-camera-stand.html
Jackson SJ (2013) Rethinking repair: breakdown, maintenance and repair in media and technology studies today. In: Boczkowski P, Foot K, Gillespie T (eds) Media meets technology, MIT Press, forthcoming
Jackson SJ, Pompe A, Krieshok G (2012) Repair worlds: maintenance, repair, and ICT for development in rural Namibia. In: Proceedings of the 2012 computer supported cooperative work conference
Kelty CM (2008) Two bits: the cultural significance of free software and the internet. Duke University Press, Durham
Levine F, Heimerl C (2008) Handmade nation: the rise of DIY, art, craft, and design. Princeton Architectural Press, New York
Logo Removal Service. Dym products, accessed 9 August 2013. http://www.logoremovalservice.com/lrs-story/
Mui P (2012) Interview with Daniela Rosner, 5 November
“Open Make @ The Hall: Cities 1/19/2013,” Google+ video, posted by “The Lawrence Hall of Science,” 19 January 2013. https://plus.google.com/100725769399791437356/posts
Orr JE (1996) Talking about machines: an ethnography of a modern job. Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY
Repplon J (2008) April 28 (2:40 am). “Clockamps—portable practice amps made from alarm clocks,” The Steampunk Forum at Brass Goggles Blog. http://brassgoggles.co.uk/forum/index.php?action=printpage;topic=8540.0
Rosner DK (2012) Material practices of collaboration. In: Proceedings of the 2012 computer supported cooperative work conference, pp 1155–1164
Rosner DK (2013) Mediated craft: digital practices around creative handwork. In Buechley L, Peppler K, Kafai Y, Eisenberg M (eds) Textile messages: dispatches from the world of education and e-textiles, Peter Lang
Rosner DK (2014) Making citizens, reassembling devices: on gender and the development of contemporary public sites of repair in Northern California. Public Cult 26(1 72):51–77
Rosner DK, Bean J (2009) Learning from IKEA hacking: i’m not one to decoupage a tabletop and call it a day. In: Proceedings of the 27th international conference on Human factors in computing systems, pp 419–422
Rosner DK, Taylor AS (2011) Antiquarian answers: book restoration as a resource for design. In: Proceedings of the 2011 annual conference on Human factors in computing systems, pp 2665–2668
Sennett R (2008) The craftsman. Yale University Press, New Haven
Skinner P (2013) Interview with Daniela Rosner, 15 January
Star SL, Strauss A (1999) Layers of silence, arenas of voice: the ecology of visible and invisible work. Comput Support Coop Work 8(1):9–30
Suchman LA (1987) Plans and situated actions. Cambridge University Press, New York
Tanenbaum JG, Williams AM, Desjardins A, Tanenbaum K (2013) Democratizing technology: pleasure, utility and expressiveness in DIY and maker practice. In: Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on human factors in computing systems, ACM, pp 2603–2612
Turner F (2006) From counterculture to cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the rise of digital utopianism. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL
Turner F (2009a) Burning man at Google: a cultural infrastructure for new media production. New Media Soc 11(1–2):145–66
Turner F (2009b) Chapter 9: R. Buckminster Fuller: a technocrat for the counterculture. In: Chu H-Y, Trujillo R (eds) New views on R. Buckminster Fuller. Stanford University Press, Stanford, CA, pp 146–159
Van Maanen J (1990) Escape from modernity: on the ethnography of repair and the repair of ethnography. Hum Stud 13(3):275–284
Witt C (2012) Interview with Daniela Rosner, 3 December
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank the Hasso Plattner Design Thinking Research Program HPDTRP for funding this project. We would also like to thank the participants in the repair collectives we observed and our research subjects who made this work possible.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2015 Springer International Publishing Switzerland
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Rosner, D.K., Turner, F. (2015). Theaters of Alternative Industry: Hobbyist Repair Collectives and the Legacy of the 1960s American Counterculture. In: Plattner, H., Meinel, C., Leifer, L. (eds) Design Thinking Research. Understanding Innovation. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-06823-7_5
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-06823-7_5
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-06822-0
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-06823-7
eBook Packages: Business and EconomicsBusiness and Management (R0)