I managed to repair my broken headphones with a 3d-printed part, and now I’m just obsessed
with mending everything around the house with little bits of plastic.
Gotta get my fix.
When you think of companies associated with design, Apple is probably one of the first
names that pops into your head: since the 90’s, the 2.4 trillion-dollar tech giant
has developed a brand around their dedication to design.
Every press release, store, and billboard stresses a commitment to sleek, minimalist
styling and meticulous curation of their users’ "experience."
Apple’s former Chief Design Officer Jony Ive has said of Apple: “Our goal isn't to
make money.
It sounds a little flippant, but it's the truth.
Our goal, and what makes us excited, is to make great products.”
From that lofty position, it might surprise you to learn that the very first product the
Apple Computer Company produced was more of a hobbyist kit than a polished device - the
8-bit Apple Computer One was engineered by Steve Wozniak and first presented to the Homebrew
Computer Club in Palo Alto, which had inspired him to make it.
Wozniak and his friend Steve Jobs handed out free schematics for the kit, and he was happy
to help his fellow computer club members build and troubleshoot their own versions.
That sort of hack-y homebrew attitude is a distant memory for modern-day Apple, which
has received a great deal of criticism for its protective animosity towards…unsanctioned
uses of its products.
The company has repeatedly blocked and discouraged jailbreaking iOS devices to circumvent Apple’s
restrictions on things like custom ringtones or multi-recipient text messages.
It’s been extraordinarily protective of diagnostic tools and technical documents that
might be helpful for any adaptation or remixing of their hardware for potentially unsanctioned
uses.
Even their marketing often implies that there is a *right* way to use Apple products, perhaps
best illustrated by Steve Jobs’s now-infamous response to widespread complaints that the
iPhone 4 couldn’t get a cell signal if the user held the phone a particular way: “Just
don’t hold it that way.”
This cloistered posture, equal parts protective and authoritative, has been especially troublesome
when it comes to the repair of Apple devices, which are, by many accounts, *unfriendly*
to anyone trying to fix them.
They are absurdly tamperproof, using proprietary screw heads, adhesives, and one-way assembly
methods to discourage any but the most dedicated tinkerers.
They use hardware ID handshakes to verify that parts used for repairs are official Apple
components, sometimes disabling key features if someone has the audacity to use aftermarket
parts.
The company, until very recently, has refused to sell those licensed components, preferring
to keep all non-warranty-voiding repairs in-house, and setting prices that often approach or
exceed the original cost of the broken device.
These policies have made Apple a fair amount of money.
They have also made a lot of people, both users and repair experts, pretty angry.
Under increasing pressure from the Right-to-Repair movement, a political coalition of regular
consumers and super nerds fighting against a trend of unnecessarily unfixable designs,
Apple has retreated a bit - you can, now, with a set of proprietary screwdrivers, a
heat gun, a steady hand, and a good instructional video, replace the screen on your iPhone 13
without permanently disabling its Face ID.
But trust and goodwill are hard to earn back, and Apple does not seem to be bending over
backward to *reverse* its reputation for making life miserable for anyone who wants to fix
their stuff.
That antagonism towards repair can be thought of as a corollary of Apple’s much-lauded
obsession with design, what Right-to-Repair activist and CEO of iFixit Kyle Wiens describes
as “wanting complete control over the device from the moment that you buy it, all the way
through to the end of life."
To ensure that every single user’s experience of Apple’s products has the "correct" slick
and polished aesthetic quality, the company has tried its best to stamp out any activity
that might disrupt that experience - a custom OS that might be uglier, an aftermarket screen
that might be less crisp, even a glance at the ugly circuit boards and ribbon cables
inside the device might ruin the vibe of unimpeachable monolithic design.
“Don’t look behind the curtain - we have thought of everything, considered every angle,
and we have everything under control.
You are in our capable hands - trust us.”
Unfortunately, it’s insanely hard for even the greatest designers to predict just how
their designs will stop working.
Take the OLPC project, as described in this 2014 paper by Rosner and Ames, a humanitarian
effort to get cheap laptops into the hands of children with no other access to educational
materials.
The designers of the OLPC pitched it to prospective donors as being impervious to damage, flinging
it across the stage mid-presentation to demonstrate its resilience.
Unfortunately, they had no way of knowing what *other* problems it would experience
in the field.
Screens were a major issue - children would often hold their laptops open and use the
selfie camera to take pictures, sometimes dropping the device onto its fragile screen,
rendering it inoperable.
A gigabyte of storage space may have been more than enough for educational activities,
but was rapidly filled by downloaded media.
Fidgety kids would pick at the plastic membrane that covered the keyboard, eventually destroying
it.
Even the highly-publicized impact resistance proved insufficient, or possibly even self-defeating
- some postmortem analysis suggests that the sales pitch of an “indestructible” laptop
may have prompted kids to treat their OLPC with less care than they would otherwise,
leading to disaster.
None of this is to say that the OLPC engineers did a bad job - it’s unreasonable to expect
*any* designer to anticipate and compensate for…enthusiastic photographers, insatiable
media consumption, boring classrooms, and the power of their own marketing to shape
behavior.
But their struggle to keep the machines operational does help to illustrate the scale of the problem
Apple is trying to design their way out of: no plan survives first contact with the enemy,
and no design, no matter how smart or robust, survives forever.
Things break…in a countless variety of ways…and, assuming that they were fulfilling some human
need before they broke, there are really only two possible responses when they do.
Replacement is the solution Apple implicitly prefers: extract the necessary resources from
the environment, process them into usable materials, ship all those materials to a factory,
shape and assemble them into a duplicate of the broken object, ship the duplicate to the
person who needs it, swap them out, and, finally, ship the broken one to be laboriously recycled
or dumped into a landfill.
As we continue to accelerate headlong into a worsening ecological catastrophe, I will
leave it to you to fill in the blanks as to why this approach leaves something to be desired.
The other option is repair.
But repair is messy, idiosyncratic, unpredictable.
Every failure of a device, even if it’s a common failure, is unique in its details
and expression - many tablets will suffer a broken screen, but no two shattered screens
are exactly alike, and there’s a degree of craftsmanship necessary to respond to the
specific challenges posed by this or that *particular* sort of screen breakage.
Unlike assembly lines, repair is not conducive to automation or rote procedure.
It requires a sort of artistry, problem-solving, and expertise in the workings of the technology,
with the time necessary to experiment and find the best way to go about restoring it
to working order.
Fixing stuff is artisanal work, and compared to turning the crank on an assembly line,
it is an expensive sort of labor.
Also, while design may be 99% invisible, we generally prefer repair to be *totally* invisible;
we describe the most masterful restoration work as making a previously broken object
“like it’s brand new,” that is to say, like the repair never happened.
This is the only way Apple will allow its devices to be fixed - you’ll never get your
Macbook back from the genius bar with a piece of gaffer’s tape holding the bezel on, even
if that’s all you really need.
While designers can hold up any of a thousand manufactured doodads and say “This is what
my efforts have produced.”
the most skillful mending and maintenance work vanishes into the background, only drawing
our attention when it’s done poorly, or not at all.
So: there’s this tension between the designer’s aspiration for control and the infinite idiosyncrasy
of failure, between highly visible and easily-automated design and highly invisible, artisanal repair.
In this 2016 paper, “Values in Repair,” a group of ethnographers at Cornell and the
University of Washington, Seattle highlight yet another way that Apple’s obsession with
design might bring it into conflict with homebrew types: where the value of a technology comes
from.
As much as we like to imagine technology as being ideologically inert, design doesn’t
just dictate how an object looks and behaves, it demonstrates, as Jony Ive puts it: “the
designer’s value system, what they care about.”
For fully functional products, working as their designer intended, a set of values is
imposed on the user and the world around them.
Like, say the designer of a video game controller thinks that recording and sharing your gaming
exploits is important, a thing that any reasonable gamer *should want to do,* so they build the
controller with a “Share” button that makes it trivial to take screencaps and videos
of your game.
The ease of that behavior is now an essential part of what it means to use the controller,
as much as its shape or weight.
Even if the user…doesn't really care about taking screenshots, or explicitly *doesn’t*
want to…every time they accidentally take one by jostling the controller the wrong way,
you can see the designer's values manifesting, struggling to find purchase.
Are you *sure* you *don’t* want to share this?
Are you *sure?* Are you *sure?*
There’s a fair amount of discourse about ideas like ecological design, design for accessibility,
human-centered design, and so on; the jist being that if designers look for ways to express
certain values in the objects they help create, the world will be better for it.
It’s true that designers play a significant part in deciding what meaning their devices
will ultimately bring to the world, but the paper’s authors suggest that by obsessing
over that initial moment of creation, we’re missing a big part of the picture: repair
can be another way for people to create meaning for technology independent of the designer’s
intent, deciding for themselves what values ought to be instantiated in a particular object’s
form and function by restoring it to working order…whatever that means for them.
Say I drop my controller and the “share” button breaks on impact - now I can’t even
play games with it because it keeps taking screenshots and videos at random.
I call a friend who’s handy with a soldering iron, and we spend a Saturday afternoon taking
the thing apart and figuring out what’s wrong with it.
She shows me how the switch under the button has been damaged, and tells me that she can
order a new one, solder it in place, and fit everything back together, good as new…but
honestly?
I don’t care about that feature at all, and I ask her to show me how to just…take
the broken one off.
Now, that controller is *special,* in a way that it wouldn’t be if I had just thrown
it out or returned it under warranty.
The share button doesn’t do anything, the way *I* like it, and every time I pick it
up or fiddle with the inert button, I think of how fun it was to see the insides of the
thing, how I’ve learned the right way to remove soldered components, and how my friend
helped me out.
These aren’t values that could be designed into the controller by anyone at Microsoft
- they might *facilitate* my journey by making the thing easy to take apart and service,
but even then, *I* have to decide how to restore the its functionality…for *me,* and that
decision may change or subvert the values of the designer.
Apple’s approach to design is meticulous, there’s no doubt about that - they pay a
whole lot of very skilled people a lot of money to think carefully about how to express
Apple’s philosophy in every facet of everything they create.
Unfortunately, that philosophy, no matter how robustly implemented, can never fully
encompass the variety of problems their users will ultimately face, and their obsessive
control over how everything with an Apple logo “should” operate is corrosive to
the maintenance of those devices and their user’s potential to create meaning by maintaining
them.
It’s not entirely their fault - we have a clear preference for the artifacts we use
every day to look *new,* not well-worn or lovingly repaired.
We tend to practice *making* much more than *fixing.* I'm certainly guilty of compelling
friends to stop "wasting their time" trying to restore old technology to working order
instead of just buying something new, even though I’ve experienced how trying to repair
something can be an empowering, enriching, educational, and enjoyable exercise in craftsmanship.
Apple’s policy towards repair plays to one of those impulses, not the other.
Considering that Wozniak himself has become a Right to Repair activist, you can guess
which side of it he comes down on.
Do you think repair and maintenance will become more valued as we face increasingly dire consequences
of overconsumption and climate change?
Are the best designs those that fully empower their users to create their own value, independent
of what the designer might or might not endorse?
Have you looked into starting or joining a local repair cafe?
Please leave a comment below, and let me know what you THUNK.
Thank you very much for watching.
Don’t forget to blah-blah subscribe blah-share…and don’t stop THUNKing. :)