Teresa Castle-Green

Electronic waste, commonly referred to as e-waste, is a health and environmental hazard that affects many people and ecosystems around the world. As the volume of e-waste continues to surge, it is imperative this issue is addressed. Contributing to this situation is the Internet of Things (IoT); an expanding industry deploying countless smart devices globally. Prolonging the lifespan of already-deployed devices through acts of repair can help to reduce the impact of IoT on climate change. A sustainable design and innovation approach to addressing this growing problem is to challenge conventional design practices focused on consumption by prioritising community repairability in design. This paper uses an ethnographic and interview approach to explore the challenges of repairing smart devices within community repair contexts. We discuss the impact of fail-fast approaches and the assumptions that repairers hold about the repairability of smart devices. Our findings demonstrate how repair café processes cause smart devices to be filtered out, thereby identifying barriers that designers and repair café organisers must navigate to successfully incorporate the repair of smart products into these settings.

As the importance of minimising e-waste and increasing sustainability increase, exploring the design matters impacting the transience of digital technologies has become a key concern. In this workshop we will explore this through the metaphorical lens of the lives, deaths, and afterlives of electronic objects. The workshop creatively engages with this by participants creating obituaries for IoT objects and postcards from the afterlife that will help us question the emotional, ethical, aesthetic and ecological implications of objects reaching the end of their life. Drawing upon our work for the EPSRC Fixing the Future Project, we anticipate that the discussions and collaborations that emerge through the workshop will generate design themes that contribute to the wider agendas and communities advocating for the Right-to-Repair of IoT devices globally.

Fueled by the rapidly increasing Internet of Things industry, the volume of global e-waste escalates annually posing significant health and environmental risks. Our research around repairability of IoT devices to elongate their lifespan has uncovered common faults, challenges and barriers to repair. To communicate this work in an engaging and impactful way, we created a boardgame raising awareness of challenges and highlighting connections between design, production, ownership and repair. This paper describes our design process demonstrating how research findings were translated into game mechanics through design iteration and testing workshops. We discuss findings from workshops to demonstrate how the game influenced thinking about links between smart device production, maintenance, policy and the climate. Through this we demonstrate how complex IoT repair challenges can be disseminated through game design. Thus contributing to both research around device repair and the growing movement of research communication through serious games.

The way consumer Internet of Things (IoT) devices are built is leading to electronic waste (eWaste) growth. This arises from planned obsolescence, bundling of ‘smartness’ creating more routes to device failure, and lacking hardware modularity and repairability. Understanding how to best tackle these issues requires an interdisciplinary perspective bridging design, law, and the social science research. The legal landscape is shifting, encouraging design of repairable and long-lasting IoT, and reducing routes to redundancy. This one-day workshop explores the interface between design and legal research to address the socio-technical challenges around designing sustainable consumer IoT devices. The workshop will: map out the societal, legal, and environmental implications of IoT; envision the opportunities and barriers to designing more sustainable IoT; and share best practice and tools to help move towards more sustainable IoT futures.

IoT products are increasingly becoming the default, with non-IoT versions of common hardware (e.g., TVs and printers) harder to find. Alongside this adoption surge, lack of support, outdated security, and planned obsolescence present concerning sustainability issues, contribute to eWaste growth and widen digital divides globally. This workshop aims to present and discuss legal, social, technical, and design aspects of repair practices, engaging the Ubicomp community in exploring challenges and opportunities for more repairable IoT devices. Focusing on diverse repair scenarios, the workshop seeks to establish a concise, holistic, and inclusive agenda for this research domain's future. Participants will map key research questions to support the movement towards more repairable technology.

Volunteering benefits recipients, volunteers, communities, and society, while digital technologies establish new opportunities for virtual volunteering. We describe how volunteers transitioned the UK's long-established Oxjam grassroots music festival online in response to the COVID pandemic, delivering a local pilot before scaling up nationwide. We adopt an infrastructural perspective to reveal how two teams of volunteers defined a flexible festival format, knitted together diverse technologies into a technical platform, and operated this to deliver the festival. We highlight the need for teams of volunteers to orchestrate both audience and performer trajectories through festivals. We argue for deliberately designing in volunteer labour rather than automating it out by translating traditional roles online while defining new digital ones. We propose to make these roles rewarding through a more social volunteer experience, including privileged backstage access. We highlight the challenges of using social media for such events, including complying with algorithmic policing of rights.

The ‘digital plumber’ is a conceptualisation in ubicomp research that describes the work of installing and maintaining IoT devices. But an important and often understated element of commercial IoT solutions is their long-term socio-technical infrastructural nature, and therefore long-term installation and maintenance needs. This adds complexity to both the practice of digital plumbing and to the work of design that supports it. In this paper we study a commercial company producing and installing IoT alarm systems. We examine video recordings that capture how a digital plumbing representative and software development team members make changes to both the installation process and supporting technology. Our data enables us to critically reflect on concepts of infrastructuring, and uncover the ways in which the team methodically foreground hidden elements of the infrastructure to address a point of failure experienced during field trials of a new version of their product. The contributions from this paper are twofold. Firstly, our findings build on previous examples of infrastructuring in practice by demonstrating the use of notions of elemental states to support design reasoning through the continual foregrounding and assessment of tensions identified as key factors at the point of failure. Secondly, we build on current notions of digital plumbing work. We argue that additional responsibilities of ‘reporting failure’ and ‘facilitation of change’ are part of the professional digital plumbing role and that commercial teams should support these additional responsibilities through collaborative troubleshooting and design sessions alongside solid communication channels with related stakeholders within the product team.