The Restart Project Blog

We are celebrating, as we’ve reached over 10,000 devices recorded through our database, affectionately known as the Fixometer.

We’ve been hard at work on educational resources that help young people gain confidence disassembling and reassembling mobiles, and learning about the raw materials inside them.

We’ve been campaigning for the past three months on crucial “Right to repair” measures at the European level.

We appeared today on BBC Breakfast and various BBC radio shows, talking about the importance of repair and changes we need to be able to repair the stuff we own and keep it longer.

As part of our push for EU regulation requiring manufacturers to make more repairable products, this morning we joined forces with Brussels-based partners to organise a flashmob to ask EU member states to stand for our right to repair our appliances and p…

Together with a broken fridge and broken appliances, we took part in what must have been the first-ever protest for spare parts in Brussels, in front of the EU institutions this morning.

There is an upcoming vote at the European level that can have global implications for the repairability and durability of our products.

This is the year the UK decided it had enough of plastic waste, and we finally learned that recycling is not the cure for all ills.

There is strong evidence showing that UK and European citizens want longer lasting and more repairable products, on the eve of an important European member state vote and the UK’s Waste Strategy.

We appeared this week on BBC Breakfast, talking about the importance of repair.

On Saturday in Manchester, 59 community repair activists from all over the UK got together to mingle, share, help each other out and think collectively about growing our movement and bringing down the barriers to repair and longer-lasting products.

Update as of 5th October: Thanks in part to public pressure, the measures have been given a green light by the European Commission.

After summer holidays in August, we are back on Restart Radio.

For the last few months, we’ve been creating Restarters.net, a new space for people involved in community repair to meet, manage events, measure impact and share learning.

Every year, “Earth Overshoot Day” is an awful day on the Anthropocene calendar.

We’ve been following Motherboard’s coverage of right to repair issues for years now, from iPhones to tractors.

On Friday, friends brought to our attention a very crude but effective PR-stunt by Chinese mobile brand Huawei.

From the beginning, we began logging repairs at our community events because we had a hunch the data was valuable and we wanted to understand what was happening at our ad-hoc events.

This guest post is by industrial designer Forrest Radford, who attended a Restart Party while a student at Central Saint Martins five years ago, and is now launching a repair-related Kickstarter campaign.

We gave a short talk at an ITU conference at LSE last month connecting a number of dots related to jobs, skills and sustainable consumption.

Monique teaching PC building (in the middle) When did you start repairing electronics and electricals?

This guest post is by maker and Hackney Fixer Bridget Harvey.

Our network grew internationally really quickly – within a couple of years to Tunis, Oslo, Barcelona, Iceland, and the US, and all over Italy.

This guest post was written by Restart volunteer Steve Cook.

Since 2016, we’ve been mapping reliable repair businesses in London: initially in four boroughs in East London, and more recently in Camden, Hackney and Waltham Forest.

If there is one thing we’ve learned attempting over 6,800 fixes together – it is that products are only getting less repairable.

We recently ran a survey for the whole Restart community and anyone interested in what we do.

What a time to be talking about internet health.

We’ve been hearing a lot about plastic waste this year.

Take our survey here Five years ago, a small group of people gathered in a pub in London and brought new life to an alarm clock, a Nokia phone and a printer.

Over the last 5 years, we’ve seen literally thousands of broken devices brought to Restart Parties.

Dave in action at Fixfest interviewing Chris from Cambridge Repair Cafes When we started with podcasting a couple of years ago, we really had no idea what we were getting into.

We don’t measure the success of our Restart Parties simply by the number of objects fixed – although this information is incredibly valuable, and the reason we created our Fixometer.

When did you start repairing electronics and electricals?

Over the past decade, the landscape of the commercial repair sector is changing: some smaller businesses are finding it tough to compete with superstores and large manufacturers, it can be difficult to affordably source spare parts or to reach new custome…

We had a huge year last year, thanks to a larger team and steady support from the Shuttleworth Foundation and our core of dedicated volunteers in London.

This guest post was written by Restarter Steve Cook.

We’ve just released the latest version of our Fixometer software – our tool for capturing data on repairs at our community events, and for reporting on the positive impacts of community repair.

We recently published a piece in Wired World 2018 on the massive challenges posed by electronic waste and specifically how electronics recyclers may struggle to keep up.

This guest post by maker and Hackney Fixer Bridget Harvey was originally published on her blog.

Apple’s admission that it intentionally slowed the performance of iPhones with older batteries certainly raised more questions than it answered.

We are all for repair gaining a higher profile, in an age of incessant consumerist messaging everywhere.

The story is all over the Internet: Apple admitted it has released software updates reducing performance for some of its iPhone models, when the capacity of the battery degrades.

We appear on The One Show tonight, talking about mobiles and why we – and professionals – struggle to repair so many of them in a cost-effective way.

We were really chuffed when CNN wanted to come along to Fixfest in October – and this feature was just released on CNN International, reaching tens of millions of viewers.

This is a guest blog post by James Diamond, Restart Project Researcher and Hackney Fixer Last week we ran a special event to discuss how to refer people in need to reliable repair businesses.

We had a truly life-changing experience at Fixfest in October!

We’re really excited about our new poster, which we developed in collaboration with illustrator Rod Hunt.

We are pleased to announce that the first version of the Open Repair Data Standard (ORDS) is now ready, following the initial meeting of the Open Repair Alliance‘s founding members in October during Fixfest.

On Saturday, Restart co-founder Ugo Vallauri spoke at Mozilla Festival (“MozFest”) 2017: the world’s leading festival for the open internet.