Repair it Yourself: A Manifesto

This weekend I was lucky enough to score a couple of tickets to the 2011 Maker Faire in San Mateo, CA. As always, it was a grand experience with plenty of creativity, technical innovation, and lots and lots of up-the-establishment geeky goodness. One thing that struck me is that this year even more than before there seems to be a heightened interest in picking up various technical skills and how-to knowledge. This brings me to one of the participants of the Faire, iFixit.

IFixit is a group dedicated to the radical notion that people should be able to repair their own stuff. To that end, they have set up a web site with a growing collection of repair manuals, how-to tutorials, and places to order parts for just about everything that is remotely repairable. At least that’s the idea. They actively solicit people to post information on how to repair it yourself. They promote the Self-Repair Manifesto, whose main points are:

Repair is better than recycling

• Repair saves the planet
• Repair saves you money
• Repair teaches engineering
• If you can’t fix it, you don’t own it

This is a wonderful idea. iFixit is building a community around the idea of fixing, repairing, and educating people by empowering them. Many of our devices and appliances are designed to be difficult to repair at home because the job of repairing them has become a major industry and money-maker. It’s long past time that changed.

iFixit has a wonderful poster with these points and some additional explication here. Download it and put it up in your garage or basement, hell… people should be duct-taping this to the front door of their local big-box appliance store.

There was a time when one could hardly be considered capable of walking upright if one couldn’t do basic repairs. My wife, who was raised on a small family farm, surprised and delighted me early in our marriage when I came home and found that she had torn apart the plumbing under the sink to get rid of a stubborn clog. I arrived just in time to watch her finish putting it all back together, clean, tight, and clog-free.

The times we live in are wont to deplete our sense of control over our world. Maybe we can’t fix the job market or the health care system, but dammit there’s a lot we can fix around the house or in our neighborhoods.