Fix Me: A Graduate Thesis by Ginny Wang

FIX ME A graduate thesis project. Written and designed by Ginny Wang. Graduate student of the Academy of Art University 79 New Montgomery Street Fifth Floor San Francisco, California 94108, USA. Find out more about Fix Me at willyoufix.me. View more work by Ginny at ginnydesign.com. To report errors, please send a note to ginny@gmail.com Graphic Design Department Chair: Mary Scott Department Director: Phil Hamelett Associate Dept. Director: Hunter Wimmer Graduate Advisor: Dawn Danby, Bob Slote & Gaston Yagmourian Printing and binding by Blurb Photography by Ginny Wang IDEO presentation photography by Dave Zhou Images collected from Flicker Creative Commons Typeface: Din Next LT Pro & Avenir.

A GRADUATE THESIS PROJECT Ginny Wang willyoufix.me

GINNY WANG GR APHIC DESIGNER

TABLE OF CONTENTS

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01 THE STORY OF WASTE

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02 03 04 INTERVIEWS IN THE FIELD

EXPLORING DESIGN

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INTRODUCTION

MY JOURNEY BEGAN BY WATCHING MY FATHER REPAIR OTHER PEOPLE’S TVS FOR A LIVING

HOW DID I GET HERE? When I was young, my father used to repair TVs and VCRs to make a living. I used to watch him repair these broken devices and think that he could do anything. Technology today isn’t what it used to be. Instead of treating these devices as important tools we use to lead our lives, we live in a world that treats electronic devices as disposable goods. It used to be that when something broke, I wouldn’t know what to do with it, and would end up replacing it with a new one. By the time I graduated college, I had accumulated a large number of electronic devices–some working and others broken and gathering dust. I realized that if I had got ten the devices fixed, I wouldn’t have needed to replace many of the gadgets that I now owned. This made me think about my own behavior of replacing over repair, and I realized that I accumulated these devices because whenever I looked for help, the easy thing to do was to just buy a new one. But it didn’t need to be this way. I researched repair options, and discovered that with the right tools and instructions, it was easy enough for even someone like me to repair the broken screen on a phone. I had the power to fix my own phone and I wanted everyone to know they could do it too. With this experience, I created Fix Me to empower people like myself who are intimidated by broken devices with the instruction and confidence to be able to fix their broken electronic devices.

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HI FRANCIS, YOU BROKE ME.WHAT NOW? GINNY WANG GR APHIC DESIGNER

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THE STORY OF WASTE

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THE GLOBAL PROBLEM

WHEN NEW DEVICES GO ON THE MARKET, OLDER MODELS BECOME OBSOLETE EVEN THOUGH MANY OF THEM STILL WORK

SO WHAT IS E-WASTE?

E-WASTE

E-Waste is a popular, informal name for electronic products nearing or at the end of their useful lives. Practically any device with a chip in it falls into this category: a computer, printer, monitor, phone, or fax machine. In 2009, according to the EPA, the United States consumed 459,600 tons of desktop and laptop computers and mobile devices.

Discarded electronic appliances such as mobile phones, computers, and televisions.

[noun]

Combined, all these elec tronic s are heavier than the Empire State building, weighing a total of 365,000 tons. Todayâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s average consumer has 2-3 obsolete computers in their garages, closets, and storage spaces. Eventually, these stored devices need to be disposed, but the United States is not managing its e-waste responsibly. 75% of electronics at their end of life do not end up in recycling facilities. We are either disconnected from or unaware of the growing global problem of e-waste. Recycling facilities in the United States claims that old electronics dropped off there will be disposed of safely and locally. However, these claims do not always hold true. Because the United States has not ratified the Basel Convention, an international treaty that was designed to reduce the movements of hazardous waste bet ween nations, approximately 80 % of the elec tronic waste direc ted to recycling in the U.S. does not get recycled, but are send to countries like China, India, Vietnam and others. Often times left for impoverish communities to burn for scrap metals in dangerous and unsuper vised conditions lef t for impoverish communities to burn for scrap metals in dangerous conditions. PAGES

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PRECIOUS MINERALS INSIDE YOUR SMARTPHONE

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THESIS MIND MAP

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HEY JEAN, IS THERE SOMEONE WHO CAN HELP? GINNY WANG GR APHIC DESIGNER

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INTERVIEWS IN THE FIELD

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GETTING AN EDUCATION

REPAIR IS TAKING CONTROL OF YOUR OWN DEVICE AND GIVING IT ANOTHER CHANCE TO BE USED AGAIN

REPAIRING THE IDEA OF REPAIR

REPAIR

Repair today isn’t what it used to be. In the 80s and 90s, when VCRs and cassette players were commonplace, electronics repair shops were practically everywhere. This is mostly due to the fact that tape players were expensive and fragile—often breaking down multiple times in its lifetime. Digital devices now don’t have many moving parts and are much cheaper, so the ubiquitous repair shops has mostly gone away.

To fix or mend a thing suffering from damage or a fault. To put right a damaged relationship or unwelcome situation.

[verb]

But it hasn’t gone away entirely, just shifted in how it is presented. There are several grassroots organizations that focus on providing repair to communities. Repair Café is an organization that provides support to local self-organized groups that want to host repair events, where people can bring in their broken household appliances and electronics to get repaired by local experts in the community. While these community-based repair meet-ups are both focused on helping the community and also reintroducing the idea that repair is an option to fix something that is broken. The biggest problem with repairing technology is fear. Fortunately, local community-organized events help reduce the fear of the unknown by showing repair for what it really is: a neighbor trying to make something broken better.

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PETER SKINNER Repair Café, Palo Alto, California

HOW DID REPAIR CAFÉ GET STARTED? In about 20 09, an organization came together in Amsterdam that called itself the Repair Café. They got some funding and set up an operation where people can bring in broken household stuff to get it fixed. We needed something like this at a local level and I didn’t find anybody else doing anything in my community. So I started to talk to folks and got a very positive response and it has continued.

HOW DID YOU GET COMMUNITY INTEREST IN REPAIR CAFÉ? I got together with a couple of my good friends and ended up spending a whole day to organize the first event. We decided, because we really had no idea how it was going to work, that we wouldn’t really publicize it very much beyond just word of mouth of our local net works. A bunch of other news outlets got wind of the story and because of this, we had a really great turn out. And then the second thing that surprised me about the event itself was the degree to which it really just felt like a community gathering. It never ceases to amaze me how enthusiastic the community is over this stuff.

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WHY DO YOU THINK PEOPLE ARE ATTRACTED TO THE IDEA OF REPAIR?

HOW DO YOU HELP PEOPLE OVERCOME THEIR FEARS OF REPAIR?

I’m guessing that it’s a combination of things. If they’re responding the way I am, par t of it is environmental concern and just wanting to make an impact, however small, on our landfill problem. I think the other aspect of it is frustration and disgust with the degree to which we have just become such as a consumer society where we just expect things to be cheap and we expec t to throw things away because replacing them is cheap. And one of the consequences is that things now are just not built to be repaired.

So that’s part of the initiative. We aim to break down that fear barrier to make people realize that it’s okay to try and take things apart. It’s okay to think about what causes us to consider repairing as opposed to tossing it. And then another part is thinking, well, maybe I can actually take this thing apart and try to dust it out.

WHY DO YOU THINK PEOPLE SHOULD REPAIR? Well I think that it is either because products are designed not to be repaired or because it’s difficult to repair them, so repair is pricey. I believe that is part of the reason. But I think people should repair for the land they live in. I mean I’m attracted from an social and economic standpoint. I’m attracted to the notion of not fostering or not supporting our throw-it-away culture or our kind of we must “buy, buy, buy” consumer culture. It’s just keeping the junk out of the landfill and keeping our environment clean.

HOW DO YOU THINK WE CAN IMPROVE THE WAY WE EDUCATE PEOPLE ABOUT REPAIR? You know, when I was a kid, we all had shop classes in junior high school and it was a mandatory class. I’m dating myself here, but women took sewing and home economics and boys took shop class. I know that’s pathetic, but at least there was shop class. I don’t there exist such thing these days. One of the things that we’re trying to do is have people who will sit side by side and work with a repair expert and understand what process they’re going through, and maybe learn about the tools that are required in order to get from point A to point B in a typical repair process.

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“WE EXPECT TO THROW THINGS AWAY BECAUSE REPLACING IT IS CHEAP.”

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“ALL YOU REALLY

HAVE TO DO IS TO LET PEOPLE KNOW IT’S OK TO OPEN THEIR GADGETS.”

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PETER MUI

Fixit Clinic, Albany, California

WHAT WAS THE FIRST FIXIT CLINIC EVENT LIKE?

HOW DOES FIXIT CLINIC DIFFER FROM REPAIR CAFÉ?

It was December 1st, 2009 in the Berkeley Village and Albany Communit y Center. We had a pret t y good demographic of people. We had a bunch of academic types, engineering and scientist types who were there, and open to the idea that they could take it apart. We had a printer with a paper jam. I told them to clean all the rollers carefully and it would resurrect it self, and lo and behold, it did. There was a random collection of people, but we had some very interesting items.

At Repair Café, it seems like they assign you somebody to work with, but at Fixit Clinic we are really more about personal self-empowerment. We really want people to be the people driving the disassembling and the troubleshooting themselves. There are no spectators; there are only people who participate. The only spectators we allow are occasionally someone will come in with a small child; and just as the same way when we were small kids, we liked our parents to take us to a construction site our down to the railroad yard to see big trains and stuff like that, there are little kids who just like to see people take this stuff apart, so they’re okay.

HAS FIXIT CLINIC CHANGED MUCH SINCE IT STARTED? No. I don’t think it has changed that much. The thing I like to do is I like to run it like an AA meeting. People have to come in. I ask them who they are and what their item is and then I introduce them to everybody. I say, “Hey everybody, say hi to Ted.” And then everyone goes, “Hi Ted.” “Ted, tell us about your DVD player.” And Ted says, “Well, I put a disc in and it seems to spin but then I get a no disc error and it won’t play.” And then we say, “Okay, we think we know what’s wrong with that.” And then we start to repair.

DO YOU WORK WITH CHILDREN OFTEN? We push kids. We promote that our events are family friendly, and we actively encourage children. And that’s another difference I’ve noticed between Fixit Clinic and other events; they don’t seem to have as many kids as we do. I say our core demographic is the middle school kids who are interested in this stuff. The kid in the family who inherits all the broken stuff and gets to take it apart before it gets thrown away.

HOW DID YOU LEARN TO REPAIR? I think I’m just that kind of person. When I say the core demographic was the precocious middle schooler, I think I was one of those kids. I was just one of those people who, when something in the family broke, before they threw it out, I was the one who was interested in taking it apart to understand how it worked. Look, if it’s fully depreciated at that point, it was going into the trash anyway, so there was no harm in letting me take a crack at it.

HOW DO YOU THINK WE CAN INTRODUCE REPAIR TO NON-TECHNICAL PEOPLE? I think at our Fixit Clinic we do a very good job with that, but we do ask people to come kind of with an open mind. At the most basic level, all you really have to do is give people comfort that it’s okay to open their gadgets. You have to describe what each thing is, how it went wrong, and what might be wrong with it now that it doesn’t work any longer.

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KYLE WIENS

iFixit, San Luis Obispo, California

HOW DID IFIXIT GET STARTED?

WHAT IS IFIXIT TRYING TO ACCOMPLISH?

It got started in a dorm room at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo. My friend Luke and I started out fixing an old iBook together. There were no instructions on how to do it, so we started the way everyone does: the hard way. It bugged us that most consumer devices lacked repair instructions. I think it should be easier for many people to learn how to fix things so we wrote some instructions the first chance we got. And we posted them online, for free. For the first time, it was easy for someone with no technical background or experience to take apart a Mac.

If you go to Wikipedia and you read the page, hopefully you’re smarter now, but you’re not going to neces sarily do anything differently. Where you’re on iFixit, I’m taking apart my phone, I see that it says, “Remove the two screws,” and I remove two screws, that’s real-world action that’s happening as a result of the web. By getting the information open and available online, there is this huge catalyst infrastructure that allows repair techs to do their job. And so our primary driving mission is just to get more ser vice information out to the public so that repair businesses can start up and exist.

HOW ARE YOU GETTING PEOPLE TO BE INVOLVED IN IFIXIT?

HOW DO YOU REACH NON-TECHNICAL PEOPLE?

It’s a community. So we spend a lot of time at a high level talking about e-waste and the issues with a repair. We give individual repair techs recognition. We have had very dedicated community members, partially because we’ve given them so much because the repair manuals are free and so incredibly helpful that they feel like they owe the community to contribute back. The next major phase for us is to encouraging repair techs who contribute by sending them business to work on.

I would assume, for every hundred people that land on our website, probably 50 of them are going to look at it and say, “There’s no way I would ever do this myself.” So they’ll look at it, they see what’s involved, maybe they’re better skilled at not getting ripped off by a repair tech, but they’re not going to do it themselves. So what It really want to do is, on the repair manual page is to drive them to a database of service technicians so they can get it fixed.

Image is sourced from wp.istc.illinois.edu CHAPTER

HOW WILL YOU GET PEOPLE TO ACTUALLY FIX THEIR DEVICES? Well, I think that most people are not going to repair their own devices. It can be very difficult to get started, and I think the key is to get people to have more trust in skilled repair techs. Their marketing materials are so bad, and so I feel that if we could just give them half a dozen templates for marketing posters for their iPhone repair business, then we can make them look awesome. If you’re a repair guy, you know a lot about how to fix things, or you want to know about how to fix things, but you don’t necessarily know anything about design or marketing or the business side of things. I’d like to make a system where it is easy for them to punch in their name and address and everything so they would automatically generate some business cards get a bunch of amazing professional marketing material, so in the space of an hour, they could put together an identity for their business. So what I really want to do is, on the repair manual page, to drive them to a database of service technicians so they can get it fixed.

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“IT SHOULD BE EASY FOR YOU TO FIX THINGS. NOT THE OTHER WAY AROUND.”

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BAY AREA REPAIR WORKSHOPS In the San Francisco Bay Area, there are two main workshops that bring a community focus to electronic repair. In the East Bay there is the Fixit Clinic, which is a community organization that helps people fix their own non-functioning electronics. They provide a workspace, specialty tools, and guidance to help disassemble, troubleshoot, and repair devices that people bring in.

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On The Peninsula, there is the Palo Alto Repair CafĂŠ, which is a social event that is focused on providing repair services and education to local community members. People can bring in their electronic devices to local experts, who help diagnose the issues and hopefully repair the devices so they can be used by the owners again. Both of these groups strive to help educate the community.

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HOLA BETTY, HOW ABOUT A NEW LOOK FOR ME? GINNY WANG GR APHIC DESIGNER

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03 EXPLORING DESIGN

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GETTING AN EDUCATION

AS A DESIGNER, MY JOB IS TO FIGURE OUT HOW GRAPHIC DESIGN CAN BE A SOURCE OF COMMUNICATION FOR IDEAS AND PRACTICES

EXPLORING THE PATH AHEAD Designing complex information is never easy. Often times as a designer I battle with figuring out how much information is just enough to inform, but not too much to bore the reader. That is where exploring the variation of style, type, color and layout helps with figuring out the design direction of my thesis. The beginning explorations are harder than the actual process itself. When I started looking for inspiration for this thesis, the possibilities were endless and often overwhelming. I started with a general batch of images that fell within specific categories that I wanted to express and from there I edited down to form a direction. At the same time I relied on my ideal audience to help guide the design sensibility. I knew that my audience was located in the bay area and were young. From that general idea I applied what I felt represented the ethos of that group with design qualities that's unique.

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HI TRAVIS, I’M STILL BROKEN. FIX ME! GINNY WANG GR APHIC DESIGNER

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MY GRADUATE THESIS PROJECT

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FIX ME DARK GREY CMYK

31, 24, 25, 0 RGB

179, 180, 179 HEX

636463

FIX ME YELLOW CMYK

0, 28, 95, 0 RGB

254, 189, 34 HEX

FEBD22

FIX ME LIGHT GREY CMYK

8, 6, 7, 0 RGB

233, 231, 229 HEX

E8E7E5

FIX ME TEAL

FIX ME RED

CMYK

78, 17, 31, 0

0, 87, 90, 0

RGB

15, 161, 174

240, 72, 47

HEX

OFA1AE

F0482F

O ANDREW WHY DID YO HINK IT W GOOD IDEA GINNY WANG GR APHIC DESIGNER

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

THANK YOU FROM THE BOTTOM OF MY HEART

WITHOUT THE SUPPORT OF FRIENDS, FAMILY, TEACHERS AND ADVISORS THIS THESIS WOULD’VE NEVER EXISTED. AND THAT WOULD REALLY, REALLY SUCK. TO MY FAMILY

TO SUFIAN

Thank you for believing in me enough to put me through school a second time. My hope is that this thesis project validates your faith in my incredibly long academic path and that you know that I love you and couldn’t have done this without you.

What can I say? You got the short straw and ended up dealing with my countless all nighters and designer idiosyncrasies. Thank you for feeding me, making sure I occasionally slept and for being the best significant other a girl could ask for.

TO MY TEACHERS

TO GASTON YAGMOURIAN

You are my guides into the design world. I want to thank Mary Scott, Phil Hamlett, Hunter Wimmer, Bob Slote, Lian Ng, Tom McNulty, Shel Perkins, Stan Zienka, Scott Tong, Brandon Callahan, Michael Kilgore, and Christopher Morlan.

I know this isn’t your name in bright lights, but you do have your own paragraph. Thank you a million times over for taking me under your wing and being both a great advisor and a mentor. This thesis was created by your tough love and iron fist. Kidding!

TO MY ADVISORS

TO MY FRIENDS

Dawn Danby, thank you for diving off the deep end with me and kickstarting this thesis process. Bob Slote, thank you for being patient, supportive and allowing me to explore different types of ideas.

IDEO and IDEO.org, thank you all for taking the time to listen to my thesis, give great feedback and supporting my interest in technology. Danny Alexander, you are one good looking model.