When designing a product for circularity it is often difficult to know where to begin. Therefore, to help designers get started and make informed decisions, a Life cycle Analysis (LCA) can be carried out using the information gathered during the research stage.

LCA is a technique to assess the environmental aspects and potential impacts associated with a product, process, or service. This assessment is exceptionally useful as it shows the designer what areas are the most impactful during the product’s life cycle. For example, the designer might think that the manufacturing stage would be the most impactful, when in reality for some products it’s the raw material extraction or its use phase. It can also help them to compare the newly redesigned product to the original, acting as a benchmark to ensure the design changes are actually positive for the environment.

However, the LCA is not an exact science and has its limitations:
•Uncertainties about the correctness of the model. There is always some level of uncertainty in the results and in the methodology; so users shouldn’t take the numbers shown as absolute values, but more as a guide to prioritise work. Not all form of impacts are valued the same, so the ones with the largest impact should be tackled first in order to produce the maximum overall improvement.
•Data Uncertainty. Gathering all the data for the LCA is the most difficult part of the task, and normally assumptions have to be made where it’s impossible to gather all the knowledge required, thus not all the relevant impacts are considered. In this case it’s much harder for me to carry out an LCA on a Gillette razor than if Gillette did the LCA themselves, as they would have all the correct info required first-hand (reducing the number of assumptions needing to be used).

Eco-Indicator Assessment

The Eco-Indicator method is a tool developed to help designers conduct a simplified LCA study. The advantage of using this method compared to a more comprehensive LCA method is that it’s much simpler to carry out and to gather the required information because the data regarding the most common materials and processes has been collected in advance. This makes it an easy and quick method to start the analysis of a product and aid the designer when creating alternative concepts which are more environmentally friendly, because they can clearly identify what areas need improvement and which ones work well already. Another advantage is that the process produces a single score (Eco-Indicator Point) for the all the impacts of the product, not just individual ones for each part. These are the reasons why I will carry out an Eco-Indicator Assessment instead of a full LCA.

In order to carry out the Eco-Indicator analysis method, the methodology described below has to be followed:
1.Establish the purpose of the Eco-Indicator calculations
2.Define the life-cycle
3.Quantify the materials and processes
4.Complete the form
5.Interpret and analyse the results

In this post I haven’t shown the whole process, but there are downloadable links to my full Eco-Indicator results, and to the template form if you’d like to carry out an assessment yourself.

1. The purpose of this assessment is to compare two different types of razors: cartridge based vs. double edge safety razor.

These results will then be used to inform the design process and improve the redesigned razor. Finally, the assessment will be carried out on the new design to assess if it has a lower impact than the other options analysed.

In this section we also need to state the assumptions made during the process:
•The blades and lubricating strip were too light to be measured with our equipment so their weights were rounded to 1g.
•The Eco-Indicator for EPDM rubber includes the manufacturing of the rubber as well as the molding process.
•The tables didn’t contain values for welding steel, so it has been assumed that the value is close to welding aluminium which is in the table.
•It has been assumed that the only part recycled at the end of life is the packaging.
•It has been assumed that the packaging contains cardboard, even though it has been made from other natural fibres like bamboo, as there is no info on those materials in the Eco-Indicator tables.
•The product doesn’t contain any material labels, so the materials have been assumed to be low alloy steel for the body, PP for the plastic parts of the body, EPDM rubber for the grip and an acrylic polymer coating for the lubricating band.

2. Define the Life-cycle – This is an example of a simple product life-cycle diagram. In this case it’s the life-cycle of the cartridge-based razor.

3. Interpretation of results – The last step in the process is to interpret the results and compare them against each other.

The hardest part of this whole process is the data gathering. In this case it was very difficult to see what materials the product contained and exactly how it was manufactured (as the big manufacturing companies wouldn’t disclose this information), so some of the data had to be assumed. This obviously makes the results less accurate, but it can still be used as a general indicator of impact.

The final value for the cartridge-based razor was 115.06 mPt, and the value for the double edge safety razor was 15.70 mPt. The biggest impact during the cartridge-based razor life-cycle is manufacturing the cartridge as this is the part which is hardest to make. In landfilling or incinerating this part, the large amount of energy and material value used in creating it is lost. By far, the biggest impact during the manufacturing of the razors was the 17 spot welds done in each cartridge.

We can see how the double edge safety razor has a much lower impact due to the low amount of parts and materials used and the fact that the blade can be separated from the rest of the body and recycled (reducing the overall impact of the product).

The body of both razors had similar impact as their weights were also quite similar. The cartridge-based razor had a slightly higher impact due to the rubber parts which can’t be separated from the plastic body.

Now that we understand the key challenges with the razors, and where the biggest impacts are occurring, we can begin to make informed decisions in the redesign. My next blog post will show some design recommendations using sketches and 3D-printed prototypes.

This project is a collaboration between the Great Recovery Programme and Fab Lab London.

Razor Teardown

Tearing down a product is an illuminating process for the designer in search of circularity. It is an excellent way to analyse a current product and identify key information about its production: how many materials and parts it is made from, and how these parts are assembled.

Leading on from this, and vitally important for circularity, it enables a prediction to be made about what will happen to the product when it reaches its end of life and enters our waste system.

To be recycled effectively, materials needs to be separated. A product that is difficult to disassemble, either by hand or mechanically (shredding), is unlikely to make it into a recycling stream and much more likely to be landfilled or incinerated. Its valuable materials lost.

You will see in the disassembly pictures below that all the razors were hard to separate manually. The cheapest, a disposable BIC, couldn’t even be separated without breaking it.

The reason for this? Products are created by designers and engineers seeking to solve the brief they have been given. For fast moving consumer goods such as the razor, this often means creating a product which combines the demands of high performance, low price and high speed. With these emphases it is unsurprising that difficult disassembly is a by-product.

On the other hand, if the razors are going to be shredded and then the pieces of materials separated, the product wouldn’t need to be designed for easy disassembly, which could be the reason why the BIC razor is attached together the way it is.

This means that razors don’t have to be designed the way they are, their design would be quite different if circularity was included in the brief since the beginning. We will use the problems encountered during the disassembly stage, and convert them into design challenges in order to improve our final design of the razor.

Possible solutions for the disassembly problems:
•Minimise the number of parts – instead of using 26 different parts.
•Minimise the number of materials – best option could be to use just one material which is fully recyclable at its End of Life without being downcycled.
•The impact created by the manufacturing method, and the difficulty in separating the materials at the waste management site would be considerably reduced if the blades were attached by snap fits or push fits instead of being spot welded 17 times each. One reason why these cartridges can’t be recycled is because the metal strips are so thin and stuck together that separating them would be labour and cost intensive.
•Labelling the materials would make it easier for customers to know where the razor should be thrown (so it can get recycled) and easier to sort the materials and parts out at its End of Life by the waste manager.

The best product in terms of circularity out of the ones analysed is the classic double edge safety razor. It contains a minimum number of materials and parts which can be disassembled in under a minute without any tools (just by hand). The blade is easy to access and replace, so the body can be kept for a long time instead of getting thrown away. This version wouldn’t probably last as long due to the cheap materials used but a metallic one would last for a lifetime. Finally the blade can be recycled so this product wouldn’t make as much impact as the cartridge-based razors (or we’ll find out during the Life Cycle Assessment).

The tearing down process of these razors has confirmed for me the need for our new design to be made in a way which is easy to assemble at manufacture and at the same time easy to disassemble at the end of life, in order to increase recycling efficiency and also to make it easier to repair and extend the products lifetime.

This project is a collaboration between the Great Recovery Programme and Fab Lab London.

As discussed in our first blog, the main reason we chose to redesign disposable razors is that they can’t be easily recycled. It’s difficult and can be dangerous to separate the blade from the rest of the product, and is not economic to do so in terms of labour costs. It is also most likely that they end up in black bin bag waste along with other non-recyclables, ultimately ending their life in incineration or landfill.

In order to carry out our research, we bought various different types of razors from a chemist, varying in quality and price. These were then broken down to analyse the materials used, number of parts, amount of materials, weight, and ease of disassembly.

Customer Research

We carried out customer research to understand people’s motivation for buying one type of razor as opposed to another.

Whilst customers focus most on economic factors – the price of the razor – they do also think about quality. Customers often don’t realise the number of available options outside of their local store or pharmacy, which include double-edge safety razors for example where 100 blades can be bought for as little as £4, compared to buying 4 cartridges for £15 .

The problem these users encounter is that they use the razor cartridges for much longer than they should in order to save money, but at the expense of their skin – as when the razor gets dull it produces tugging and irritation.

The way razor companies deal with this is by selling shaving gel, and adding numbing agent chemicals  so it doesn’t hurt you as much when the razor tugs. These chemicals are not good for long term use and can cause premature aging and drying. Even the synthetic colour and scent of the cream can cause irritation.

If men (and for the purposes of this project we have focused mostly on men) had a larger offer of different products – for example old school double edge safety razors, instead of the same product manufactured by different brands, they might discover that there are cheaper and potentially healthier options available.

Interview with Waste Manager (Regis Road Recycling Camden) + Barber (Murdock London)

Design is a critical stage in any product lifecycle, especially in terms of end of life and sustainability, as 80% of the environmental impacts of the product will be decided during this stage.

The first step in the process of design is the brief generation. A brief focuses on the desired results of the design, and contains the problem statement (what is the problem we want to solve), the goals of the product (aims + objectives) and any constraints (budget, time, etc.)
Normally briefs contain one line, if anything, which describes the sustainability requirements of the product: “The product should be more environmentally friendly than the previous model” for instance. This is unless there is a law which obliges the company to act more thoroughly, for example the End of Life Vehicles (ELV) act in the automotive sector. In our case, the whole project will revolve around circularity, so our aims and objectives for the product will be based on the Four Design Models.

The Great Recovery’s Four Design Models diagram is a practical tool for re-thinking and re-designing products and services for a more circular economy:

• Design for longevity

This is the way we used to design things: for long life and fixability. Products can be easily taken apart for upgrade or repair, and are well crafted and reliable. Users place high levels of trust in these products and are emotionally attached to them, increasing the likelihood that they value them for a long time and then pass them on to another owner rather than throwing them away.

• Design for leasing or service

The product-sharing business model is becoming more common as leasing is seen as an alternative to ownership. It allows for higher specifications of design and materials that increase life and durability. The material stays in the ownership of the manufacturer as the product is never sold, so value is kept within the system.

• Design for re-use in manufacture

These business models and systems support the return of old products to manufacturers so that they can upgrade or replace components, fix and resell them. Reverse supply chains and effective legislation are important factors in remanufacturing. These products need to be designed for easy factory disassembly in order to increase their material utilisation.

• Design for material recovery

Products in this outer loop can be reprocessed – recycled – into new materials. These procedures can involve intensive recovery methods that extract the most value currently available. Design for fast-flowing product streams such as packaging must work effectively with the recovery industry to increase the value of material recovered and to reduce contamination and multi-material complexity.

Some of the things we considered for the brief were: local manufacture, long life in-use, recycled and recyclable materials, and eliminating waste.

We then had to choose what product we would redesign (or design from scratch, as a simple redesign would not be enough). There are millions of options and examples of bad product design, so it was a hard choice. We wanted something that just had one function (for example, cleaning teeth), a low value/ high volume product, and that had quite a short life – meaning it would end up in landfill soon after it’s manufactured. We wanted to rethink and redesign a product which typically has a linear lifecycle, and which people don’t give a second thought to before throwing away.

Design for a linear system is the most common method of product design, although it is changing little by little as sustainability becomes more important in the design world, and is being taught in universities and some schools. In our case, we wanted to design the product to go against this common methodology,
and follow a more circular pattern.

There are different strategies to design different products, and there is no one-way of designing a product for circularity, as demonstrated by the 4 Design Models diagram. In this project we will try and follow each of the paths to create different solutions or concepts for each, which could then be combined to make one or more final products.

Our project will revolve around disposable razors, to design a solution which won’t go into landfill at the end of its life. A full explanation of this choice will be shown in the next post in the series.

Even during this really early stage of the process we’ve already found some problems:

• People have different opinions on what sustainability is – is it circularity? Cradle to cradle? Energy use?
• Making a product sustainable is too broad, the brief has to be narrowed down so it can be carried out – you can’t work on solving every problem at once (further iterations could concentrate on improving other problem areas)

This project is a collaboration between the Great Recovery Programme and Fab Lab London.

At the London Wearables Show in March Apple finally unveiled their latest masterpiece – their Apple watch. It seems “wearable technology” is the coolest kid around. Numerous companies are developing or selling their own wearable gadget; normally it’s just a wristband that tracks your health, or a smartwatch which tries to jump on the bandwagon that Apple has just created. Even though all these products are useful, for now most of them are likely to be quirky gadgets bought by early technology adopters and then forgotten on a bedside table after six months.

Wearable technology is an interesting advancement, and the “internet of things” is quickly becoming a reality; but do we have the capability to dispose of more and more electronics? We are already starting to run short of some of the raw materials needed to make electronics. What will happen when everything, from your toaster to your watch to your fridge, contains even more complex electronics so they can all talk to each other – so when you wake up, your coffee is already prepared because your watch has told the coffee maker you’re awake, and this then prepares you fresh coffee without you having to move a finger!

The danger of this wave of wearables is that they are the vanguard of a new technology: soon there will be another wave of more advanced products which will be far more interesting – think back to how smartphones started; and the designers and companies who make these wearables know they will be discarded as soon as the next wave takes over. So why do we not think about what will happen to the first lot when this happens? Why do we not design a suitable end of life for products so that materials and electronics can be recovered and reused?

And where will all these discarded wearables go? Most likely, incineration or landfill. This is because considerations of circularity are still not one of the priorities when designing a product; they are not evident in most client briefs. If more designers thought about making products suitable for a circular economy, the materials and electronics of the first wave of products could in theory be used to feed the second or third wave of products.

My biggest disappointment after attending the wearables expo in London was that it seemed most companies weren’t thinking about the environmental or end of life impacts of their products. Products were brilliantly designed in terms of aesthetics and size, but horribly thought about in terms of sustainability. My favourite product in the expo was designed in such way that it was impossible to get into, and therefore very difficult to repair. Even though the team updates the product often, in order to extend its life; they told me that the product couldn’t be used for too long or reused by someone else as the material that is touching the skin constantly gets contaminated by sweat.

It’s a hard task, but sometimes the designer has to think more deeply about the system behind a product, especially in the case of start-ups which are creating iterative products which are likely to be quickly bought and thrown away.

If we dream of a future of interconnected and “intelligent” products, then we would do well to remember our intrinsic connections to our environment, and the far-reaching consequences of wearable, “disposable” technology.

Daniel Charny curated the Fixhub for the Lodz Design Festival, Poland’s largest design event, in October 2014. Here he talks about the thinking behind the Fixhub as a prototype for a new type community makerspace for every neighbourhood

“The future needs a new relationship with making. A forward-thinking, backward-looking, sideways-stepping kind of making. A making born of the imaginative use of skills. Something like fixing.”

Our lives in the 21st century have been shaped by industrial revolutions and mass-production. And while quality of life has improved through democratised access of goods to millions, it has come at some heavy costs. One of which is that the abundance of low cost standardised products and their distribution is a massive strain on our environment. Another is that it is impacting on the identity of humans as makers. Most people, including professional designers are so distanced from the experiences of fabrication that we are loosing the knowledge of materials and making. Most people live with the limited choices of buying new or doing nothing. This ‘Brave New World’ needs fixing. Fixing in the sense of addressing the balance of knowledge and access.

The Fixhub prototype explores a vision in which more of us can repair and make things ourselves. It proposes a place where people can make fixing part of their day to day life. Building on new models of public-facing makerspaces like the Fablabs and repair cafes, the aim is to offer a low barrier access where people can build confidence in making through fixing and repair.

The Fixhub was developed in close collaboration with the emerging British Council Maker Library Network which actively promotes social creative collaborative studios where making, reading and showing work all take place in the same environment.Maker Library Fixhub offered daily courses on repair and design in the makespace. The Library displayed  specialist reference and inspiration books about making and repair. A special section, developed in collaboration with the RSA Great Recovery Materials Library was dedicated to materials that are setting particular repair challenges. Another section, developed with the Institute of Making showcased a selection of materials with unique properties such as self-healing concrete or strong adhesive qualities that will be used in the future. The gallery element presented a review of strategies and approaches to fixing. Ranging from practical solutions for repairing broken things to celebrating repair as new aesthetics. Exhibits included projects about accepting the broken by adaptive modified behaviour alongside inventions for reusing materials and rethinking distribution systems.

A special section of the exhibition engaged visitors with maker movements manifestos and invited them to join a debate speculating on what our world may be like if fixing became the norm or what if fixing was banned ?

A key reference to the project was Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, which was the wider theme of the Lodz Design Festival for this year. The exhibition in the Fixhub was titled Brave Fixed World and incorporated the provocative Hypnopaedic slogans claiming that ‘The more stitches the less riches’ and that ‘Ending is better than mending’.

Whether you think of fixing as a utopian or a dystopian idea, as an essential opportunity or a sentimental backlash, it is part of our future. How much and in what way depends on how people, societies, organisations shape its environmental and cultural significance. Many minds need to be involved in making these plans and many more hands in enacting it. Design and designers could have a significant role in a much needed stewardship.

The Fixhub is joining the emerging Maker Library Network (MLN), developed by the British Council ConnectZA programme, to connect young creatives in South Africa and the UK.  The Lodz Design Festival Maker Library is the first pilot of the Fixhub model and aims to introduce and extend the MLN to new regions.

Partner of the exhibition: British Council

I’m relatively new to hacking or so I thought until I cast my mind back to what I used to do as a kid. Whenever I would get a toy I would always dismantle it to see how it worked. Looks like I’ve still got the bug! The purpose of this exercise was to have a bit of fun dismantling a printer without breaking the components, with the aim of salvaging some of them for use in other projects. “A lot of the fun is in dismantling without damaging the parts”

It took me 75 minutes altogether to take the printer apart with a Torx screwdriver set and some mole grips. During the teardown, I took some safety precautions by donning a pair of safety goggles. You never know where fragments can fly so it’s always better to be safe than sorry.

The main components I salvaged from the tear down were two motors, these were a C904560001 and a C9000 60005. A quick Google search on these two part numbers brought up a lot of information. It turns out that refurbished motors are worth about £20.

Other components that I managed to reclaim were assorted fasteners, plastic gears, springs, and stainless steel rods in various diameters. Further components could have been extracted from the circuit boards such as micro switches, but further work would be required and time versus parts value was a consideration at this point.

However the overwhelming majority of the printer was made out of a plastic called ABS, as is the case in a large proportion of consumer electronics. The question I wanted to know is can this material be recycled for use as ABS filament which is currently used in 3D printing?

So, I visited the Omnidynamics stand at the TCT + personalize show 2014. The clever team at Omnidynamics have invented a machine called a Stooder that produces ABS filament from ABS pellets. This machine reduces the cost of buying 3d filament by 80% and has been designed as a compact and easy to use device for the home, schools and businesses. They are also aiming to invent an add-on recycler unit which would turn household plastic waste, into filament. Perhaps in the future, we will see the ABS casings from consumer electronics, like the printer, recycled into ABS filament and be 3d printed to create a new product, in our homes!

Electric vehicle popularity has skyrocketed in the past decade and will continue to do so.  It’s estimated global electric vehicle sales will increase by 48% each year until 2020.  The charging infrastructure has grown tremendously — in fact there are two charging stations outside the Circle Economy office — and the cost of batteries (which is a significant portion of a vehicle’s cost) is predicted to decline drastically over the next year.

But do electric vehicles have a place in a circular world?  They do reduce the ecological impact while driving (compared to combustion engines), but the electricity still needs to come from somewhere.  Since today’s electricity generation is not completely powered by renewable resources — often coal and gas are used — there are still many steps to be taken until electric cars can be fully circular.

An electric vehicle also contains more copper than a conventional one, and because of this, the automotive world’s copper demand (which currently accounts for 6% of global copper demand) is expected to increase in the coming years.  As this material is already becoming increasingly scarce, the need for implementing circular design is tremendous.

On your way to work this morning you may have squeezed yourself onto public transport alongside a sea of people engrossed in their I-pads/ Smartphones/ Kindles. Quite possibly, you were likewise engaged. Today, the chances are that wherever you are, if you look around you’ll see the ubiquitous image of human-plus-gadget that has come to characterize the early 21^st century.

The 5.9 billion mobile phone subscribers worldwide reveals that the spread of these gizmos is global. In Africa for instance, half of the continent’s population is believed to own a mobile phone (more than own a toothbrush), and numbers are on the rise. That’s over 500 million mobile owners in Africa alone.

Confronted with numbers like these, it’s easy to get the impression that the whole world truly is ‘connected’, and in some ways this is true. We’ve all experienced the enormous value of online conversations with relatives or friends across the globe. As well as being convenient, these communications are tremendously useful – for example in building campaigns for environmental and social justice around the world.

But there is another side to the story; one that we ignore at our peril.

Making, transporting, consuming and disposing of our gadgets and technology is resource intensive, environmentally and socially destructive and has severe consequences for our global climate (a run of the mill laptop may have an ‘ecological rucksack’ of up to one tonne). We urgently need to Wake Up to these true costs of our technology.

The life story of an average Smartphone:

In order to mine the raw materials necessary for manufacturing electronics, land grabs are being initiated on a huge scale by corporations the world over. Securing the resources to feed a hungry market, they are forcing local communities off their land and into poverty. Once ‘purchased’, this land is strafed for ores and minerals in mines that devastate local habitats, pollute water sources and create deserts of waste.

The litany of elements extracted are then transported thousands of miles for manufacture in outsourcing hotspots such as China. Here, workers are subjected to military management and paid a pittance for long hours spent feverishly manufacturing circuit boards in unhealthy conditions.  Yet more carbon-intensive transport then takes these goods onwards for assembly into finished products, and then on again to our shelves. A look inside a printer at a recent Restart party found parts from Singapore, China, Austria and Korea, all assembled in the USA and bought in the UK.

For a while, these products satisfy us.  But after a time, they begin to look a little less shiny, a little more scuffed and, given a helpful nudge by the obsolescence built into much of our tech, start to play up a bit.  Meanwhile, social pressures exerted through advertising entice us with ‘newer, better, faster’ stuff and, before you know it, it’s time for an upgrade.

Today we’re upgrading faster than ever before, replacing our phones as regularly as every 12-18 months in some nations. But the obsolete and unfashionable gadgetry we discard doesn’t disappear. Much of it will become the 20-50 million tonnes of ‘E-waste’ produced each year.

Most of this will find its way to an e-wasteland in Ghana or the Philippines. Shipped under the pretext of ‘bridging the digital divide’, in reality this tech will sink into the graying muck, or be collected barefoot, then burnt by communities who find themselves living in sooty shanties by black rivers, subsisting off the money they can make from selling scrap on the margins.

This reality is conveniently hidden from consumers beneath the pristine packaging and sleek design of our gadgets. The great irony of the digital age is that as we have become increasingly connected to the virtual world, we have become disconnected from the real world.  We have lost sight of those affected by our consumption of technology, and of the physical realities of what Earth can sustain.

So what can we do about it?

We must exert pressure on those steering the industry and those with authority over them, to make corporations take ‘extended producer responsibility’ seriously. If they want to continue to churn out new phones and laptops then they must be made responsible for their proper reinvestment, moving us towards a circular economy that breaks the linear cycle of ‘take, make, dispose’, and helps build a ‘zero-waste’ future.

Closer to home, the old economic truism of ‘supply and demand’ reminds us that we can make a difference by simply choosing not to buy a new phone. After all, it is our insatiable desire for this stuff, expertly encouraged by companies whose first focus is on profit, which drives the land grabs, mining, human rights violations, pollution and climate change.

Quite simply, we need to consume far less.  You can do this by re-using old phones and laptops, swapping them, getting them fixed by those pioneering a tech-y fight back against overconsumption and learning to repair them yourself. Love your stuff and try to be part of a new kind of materialism that values better, not more.

But if you really must have that new gizmo, at least be cognizant of the issues. Research which companies recycle best, who is ‘greener’ and consider supporting a company like Fairphone who really embrace sustainability. The tools are there for you to be a more responsible consumer and steward of the planet. Your actions – your cash – speaks the language that drives the whole system. Use it wisely and be the change you want to see.

Whilst there are plenty of people that will tell you that you can’t make a difference – that individual change is hopeless and cliché – the difference between doing nothing and doing something is, quite literally, infinite.

To find out more, check out the Short Circuit Report from The Gaia Foundation.

We all know that there are those among us who simply can’t get enough of new technology – wanting all shapes and sizes and salivating over every minor improvement.  But whilst it seems these ‘tech omnivores’ are widespread, a 2013 Deloitte survey found that only a quarter of American adults own all three of the most popular devices – smartphone, laptop and tablet.  This suggests that appetite for endless upgrades to our tech arsenal is not as great as often assumed. So what is going on here?

It seems that our perceptions are skewed by mobile providers and actors with a vested interest in selling more, aided by a mass media which either uncritically copy-pastes data from their surveys and press releases, or laments a growing “digital divide”.  There is a distinct lack of credible research about the consumption habits and aspirations of those of us in the middle, who use electronic devices regularly but are not so keen to mindlessly devour every new tech morsel dangled in front of us.

At The Restart Project we have a unique perspective into this group, who we suspect are a large but invisible part of the population. We have hosted over 40 community electronics repair events in London – called “Restart Parties” – and have met over 750 people who want to use their gadgets longer. Our volunteers have helped these people avoid unwanted waste and expense through troubleshooting and repairing their existing devices such as smartphones, printers, laptops and stereos.

Perhaps you are imagining a bunch of aging luddites coming together in some vain attempt to remain in the past. But all kinds of people come to our events, from young people who are tech savvy but feel shut out of their devices, to white collar professionals who would like to extend their home DIY skills to include smartphone repairs. Workshops are attended by equal numbers of women and men, and people of all ethnic and socio-economic backgrounds.

Lisa, for example, bought a solar charger for her mobile, only to find it was virtually impossible to change the battery without breaking the device. And John, who uses a smartphone and work computer for most tasks, wanted an extra year out of his old laptop instead of buying another.

These are people who enjoy new technology, but would like more control over what they buy and when, and who feel increasingly alienated by the sleek but sealed gadgets they depend on. Their frustration is a logical consequence of deliberate features of the electronics industry: built-in obsolescence, lack of support for widespread faults, and limited access to spare parts, software support and information on disassembly for repair.

People are tiring of the tech hype-machine. At first, we thought our views were “fringe”, but what we have realised through blogging and networking with people around the world is that people like us exist in increasing numbers. We call for more attention to be paid to this ‘silent majority’, including more research into what motivates and frustrates us, and how we consume and would like to consume technology.