Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Transition Berkeley has cultivated a community of practice that hits close to ground zero – a “culture of repair,” that demonstrates a way to live with more humility, making do with what we have by sharing knowledge and skills, one repair at a time.
The pandemic has created many challenges for skills exchanges and other sharing initiatives that rely on person-to-person contact.
Why do we have so much stuff? Why is it so hard to find good stuff? And when our cheap stuff breaks, why is it so hard to fix it?
“For three or four hours, you have an amazing operating system that runs on very little money, but just people who sincerely want to help each other. This is where I have heard many people say, ‘This is the kind of world I want to live in.'”
According to the Repair Café Foundation, there are now more than 950 repair cafés worldwide with 18 in the UK. Repair cafés offer individuals with ‘fixing’ expertise to come together to perform a useful service for their community, while enjoying the camaraderie of friends and neighbors.
In Argentina, people with damaged or broken items meet to repair them at the Repair Club….Clothes, home appliances, toys, books, bicycles: even the most hopeless items can be fixed according to the Club de Reparadores (Repairers’ Club)…
Actually, in Silicon Valley, some engineers do still work with their hands, some people appreciate the beauty in broken things and some people help each other for free for the fun and good will of it. Here’s a story of how that happened all at once for me.
At the Repair and Service Center in Vienna, the long-term unemployed retrain to be "mechatronic engineers" and repair electronic devices.
As consumers, we are taught to be dissatisfied with what we have.
The mental image we were brought up with of Santa’s workshop was of hoards of elves working away making new stuff, painting wooden trains with paintpots and so on. But what if we were able to shift that image, and instead tell our children that the elves aren’t making stuff, they’re repairing it?
If you’ve ever found yourself on the phone with a customer service representative telling you it would cost more to fix your electric tea kettle than to just buy a new one, you are well acquainted with the concept of "planned obsolescence." The good news is that people across the world are getting wise to the intentional design flaws hoisted upon us by clever manufacturers eager to sell more products, and are coming up with new and creative ways to salvage perfectly usable things.
