1. Breaking, Fixing, Building: Information Science and the Art of Repair Steven Jackson, Cornell University http://sjackson.infosci.cornell.edu Faculty of Information, University of Toronto, November 21, 2013

2. There is a crack in everything; Thats how the light gets in. -- Leonard Cohen, Anthem 3. Background and conceptual roots Three (current) empirical cases Implications and directions for information scholarship 4. Writing and Related Work Steven J. Jackson, Rethinking Repair, in Tarleton Gillespie, Pablo Boczkowski, and Kirsten Foot, eds. Media Technologies: Essays on Communication, Materiality and Society. MIT Press: Cambridge MA, 2013. Steven J. Jackson, Alex Pompe, and Gabriel Krieshok, Things Fall Apart: Maintenance and Repair in ICT for Education Initiatives in Rural Namibia, 2011 iConference. Steven J. Jackson, Alex Pompe and Gabriel Krieshok, Repair Worlds: Maintenance, Repair, and ICT for Development in Rural Namibia, in CSCW, 2012. Values-in-Repair (in prep) Learning to Fix: Ethnographies of Repair in Bangladesh (in prep) Breakdown, Obsolescence, and Reuse: HCI and the Art of Repair (under review, CHI 2014). 5. So: the world is always breaking; its in its nature to break. That breaking is generative and productive. It is also consequential, and many of the things we care about as information scholars turn out to be implicated in precisely such moments. And it is always being recuperated and reconstituted through repair. The question then becomes what we make of those facts, and what we do next. 6. Repair and innovation Knowledge/power and repair Repair, maintenance, and the ethics of care 7. photos Edward Burtynsky, represented by Nicholas Metivier, Toronto / Howard Greenberg and Bryce Wolkowitz, New York. Images from the Shipbreaking and Ship Recycling series are available at http://www.edwardburtynsky.com/. 8. How to fix technology studies Expanding the range of technology actors and processes Expanding temporal range from design/stabilization/construction/adoption to longer-run relations embedded in repair New modes of responsibility and object relations Bridges to adjacent fields (design, HCI and CS, but also discard, craft, environmental, development, sustainability, etc . studies) 9. Values-in-Repair: Amateur Fixer Movements 10. Repair Worlds / Learning to Fix 11. Scale: HCI and the Art of Repair 12. RECLAIMING REPAIR CALL FOR PARTICIPATION CHI 2013 WORKSHOP Paris, Sunday April 28, 2013 http://reclaimingrepair.wordpress.com/ 13. Walter Benjamin, Theses on the Philosophy of HistoryPaul Klee, Angelus Novus 14. Mobile Phone Repair Practice in Bangladesh 15. Biography as HCI MethodAKMAL Owner and Trainer AKMALs Mobile Servicing & Training Institute, DhakaRONY Mobile Phone Repairer Gulistan Underground Market, DhakaJAYNAL Vangari Businessman Coffee House Street, Elephant Road, DhakaWhat you see here, at the Underground Market and other repairing sites: these are all snapshots for you. You see how things are right now. But you will not understand how things were born, how they changed over time, and they became what they currently are. I have been seeing this for a long period of time. So for me this is more like a movie. Because I can see how the snapshot of today changes tomorrow. - Akmal, Owner of AKMALs Mobile Servicing and Repair Institute, Dhaka. 16. Repair EcologyRonyBrand RepairerChinese Wholesale MarketUser Chinese E-waste Recycling MarketJaynalAkmal 17. Kinship in Vangari CommunityDhaka Sylhet 18. Motivations It became necessary for me to leave the job at the ornaments shop, because that was portraying me as a dull and un-smart person. I wanted to be a smart person and I was confident that I would be able to do something smart. So, I left the shop immediately and started looking for a technical job. At that time I was blind in love. Ripon, Mobile phone Repairer at Eastern Plus Market, Shantinagar, Dhaka. I had always been interested in electronics. In my childhood, I would play with broken electronic devices that my family would throw away. Although I ended up with graduating in Accounting, I decided I should work in technical field. - Akmal, Owner of AKMALs Mobile Servicing and Repair Institute, Dhaka. To start as a Vangari, you dont need any capital. For a poor young people like me, this is a good profession. - Sabbir, 19 years old Vangari boy working in Elephant Road, Dhaka A lot of young guys would have no job if repairing did not become this big of a market. Now they can at least work and earn some money instead of say, being frustrated and taking drugs. - Masud, Repairer of Gulistan Underground Market. 19. ApprenticeshipLearning ProcessesPolytechnic InstitutesSemi-formal InstitutionsLearningTraining in other countries Books & ManualsSelf ExperimentsOnline Resources 20. Apprenticeship 21. Apprenticeship Nobody will teach you in detail. Nobody has that much time. You have to have a sharp eye. Also you need to remember everything that is happening around you. When you will go back to your home, you have to think about these. Why did he (the technician) did that? You need to ask the question to yourself, and then you have to find out the answer. If you dont do this, you will not be able to learn in a repair shop. Ripon, Mobile phone Repairer at Eastern Plus Market, Shantinagar, Dhaka. You should watch them carefully, although most of the time you will not understand anything. You just see and remember. Sometimes they will explain you things. They actually have to do that. Because, they will need your help in future. A good learner is he, who remembers everything and tries to understand things later. Also you need to have a good relationship with the superiors. When they are friendly with you, you will get many times to ask them questions. When they will see that you are trying to understand things, they will help you. But if you pretend like you understand everything, they will be pissed off. Again, if you show no interest in learning, they will be disheartened. - Akmal, Owner of AKMALs Mobile Servicing and Repair Institute, Dhaka. 22. Apprenticeship 23. Thank you comments, questions, and ideas welcome Steve Jackson, Cornell University sjj54@cornell.edu http://sjackson.infosci.cornell.edu 24. A Klee painting named "Angelus Novus" shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress. (1969, 257-258)