The Renaissance of Repair: A Timely Opportunity for Fabrication Research
For the personal fabrication research community, it advocates for a shift in focus towards repair, leveraging the right-to-repair movement.
The paper argues for repair-centered fabrication research as a timely and impactful topic, defining repair as a five-step process and discussing challenges and opportunities for each step.
Through the rise of the right-to-repair movement, along with supporting legislation, we are currently witnessing an attitude shift in favor of repairing. This opens up various opportunities for personal fabrication research. Although the field has shifted more towards sustainable practices, repair is rarely the main focus. In this paper, we want to make the case for repair-centered fabrication research as a timely, relevant, impactful, and therefore meaningful topic. We describe potential avenues researchers could pursue by defining repair as a five-step process, including issue identification, exploring solutions, acquiring materials, performing the repair, and testing, and discuss challenges and opportunities for each step.