Sweet songs never last too long on broken radios. -- John Prine
For Earth Day 2010, iFixit.com has announced an ambitious goal: To teach every person on Earth how to fix each thing they own. To that end, iFixit has expanded their wiki-like platform for online repair manuals beyond the Apple product line. In this interview, Kyle Wiens, co-founder of iFixit, talks about developing an appreciation for repair and tapping into the expertise of DIY communities who share what they know how to do. It's about learning how to care for things that are broken instead of throwing them away.
Don't you hate when that happens!
Dale Dougherty: What do you think will make more people *want* to repair things?
Kyle Wiens: Repairing things yourself is almost always cheaper than replacement, so convincing people that repair is a good thing actually isn't that hard. The tricky thing is convincing them that they can do it. So I think the biggest thing we can do is to make repair as easy as possible, and accessible to as many people as we can. We've found that providing people with step-by-step photo instructions ahead of time makes all the difference in the world. Rather than saying "I don't know if I could ever fix my iPod," they look at the photos and say "Oh, is that all it takes? I can do that!"
We need to get back to the days when repair was something we took for granted. When my dad was growing up, it was commonplace for people to maintain their own cars. People don't tinker with cars as much anymore, and that's a shame. This is partly because our culture doesn't value things as much, and partly because cars are much more complicated now.
Fortunately, technology can make it easier for us to fix things. Tinkerers worldwide are connected now better than ever before, and we are planning to collaborate with them to write a free, open repair manual. Our hope is that comprehensive, easy to follow service documentation will make repair accessible so that people will be excited about making their things last longer.
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