After a bit of a hiatus, our podcast is back and we were honoured to be joined by Mark Miodownik for a chat about researching and communicating around repair. Mark is not only an author, engineer, Professor of Materials and Society at UCL, and a director of the Institute of Making but also the newly appointed Royal Society Professor for Public Engagement with Science — meaning that he’s really good at turning people who think they are apathetic about the material things (less in the Madonna sense and more like Aluminium honeycombs and Nano Fibres, to name a couple) in our world, into enthusiasts.
We need to talk about engineering
Mark shares with us how he got into public engagement around engineering and repair. It turns out that it’s out of love and a personal passion for the subject! He believes that engineering should be as revered as much as art, music, and movies because it is, and has long been, a really integral part of human culture. We learn that a key part of effectively communicating about repair, in Mark’s opinion, is to play on your own enthusiasm about the subject, finding commonality, and an in-road to make the topic just as exciting to them — one of the ways that he does this is by talking about his bike. An example of this is the Materials Library at the IoM, making it a tactile and real experience that people can engage with.
And as much as it’s important to get the general public interested in repair, we need to also be communicating its impact to funders and the government. One way that we can do that, Mark says, is by talking about its social value and the impact it has to strengthen our communities, and on our mental and physical health.
Big findings from the Big Repair Project
Recently, Mark was part of a team that undertook a wide-spanning piece of research called the Big Repair Project, where they looked into repair habits in the UK, what influences them, and most importantly what is stopping people from repairing their stuff. When it came to barriers to repair, some of the main ones included cost, how long repair takes, the societal norms of consumer culture, apathy of the general public towards saving their stuff, and discouragement from manufacturers.
“By and large people don’t enjoy throwing things away. It’s not something that gives them a kick, mostly people just want it to work and they actually appreciate the objects…we found that they felt like they had no choice, because buying new is the cheapest option in many cases.”
He shares some other major findings from the study, including what surprised him. It turns out that people expect their small electricals to last an average of five years and bigger white goods to last for ten — and this simply isn’t happening. So next they thought, how can we make this the reality? That’s what their next study is about.
A washing machine for life?
Mark shares his vision of a world where a washing machine was so repairable, so long-lasting that it could be passed down from generation to generation. So in the upcoming study, they’re going to find out what would be needed to make that happen. Part of it, he says, comes from utilising the technology that is now starting to be built-in to our white goods — technology that to most of us currently seems a bit unnecessary. But they are wondering if solutions like prompts for maintenance could prolong the life of these machines significantly.
“They’re making a machine that starts out as rocks in one part of the world, gets made into steel, gets made into all sorts of copper windings for the motor, adds plastics and rubbers, and then it ends up in your hands. And they do all of that for 250 quid. That’s quite a remarkable engineering achievement. But the truth is…by having it so finely attuned to the price point, they’re prone to failure.”
It’s a difficult balance. Under our current system, manufacturers struggle to produce these machines while also hitting profit margins and encouraging new sales. He shares a few possible solutions, ones that would likely be very effective. But ultimately, it’s an issue that is bigger than any one company. Instead, it requires an overhaul of how governments and policy makers think about our economy and more sustainable models.
The self-repairing smartphone
We couldn’t end our conversation without bringing up the concept of self-repairing materials. So, Mark gives us a run-down of what progress has been made so far including self-repairing cement and paint, that are already being used in our day-to-day lives. The idea, he says, is that these materials will be able to mimic the repair mechanisms inside our own bodies, monitoring for when work is needed and acting on that without our intervention.
It’s a necessary technology to ensure that we become more resilient against the effects of climate change, keeping infrastructure like bridges and roads in good condition. But it’s also a technology that could be applied to our devices. Though at the moment we haven’t quite gotten there, Mark explains how he sees ‘animated’ self-repairing phones could be in our future.
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[Photos courtesy of Mark B and Marianne Cornelissen-Kuyt licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0]
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