112 Fiona Dear: reviving repair and reuse for our tech

We meet Fiona Dear, a Co-Director at The Restart Project, which aims to keep our electronics in use for longer through repair and reuse. The Restart Project champions community repair, supporting regular Restart Parties where people teach each other how to repair their broken and slow devices. The Restart Project uses the data and stories they collect to help demand better, more sustainable electronics for all.

Having recognised that there’s only so much we can do to prevent waste downstream, the Restart Project is making waves upstream, campaigning for stronger regulations for better design, our right to repair and more support for the repair economy.

Before Restart, Fiona spent over 15 years working to engage public audiences in environmental issues. At the Restart Project, she oversees UK programmes and campaigning.

Fiona tells us about some of the many initiatives that the Restart Project has worked with partners to pioneer, including the Right to Repair movement (now with 100 organisations in the coalition), Restart Parties and more recently, Fixing Factories and FixFest.

I’m a big supporter of open sourcing, and this is central to what the Restart Project does – helping people collaborate and learn from others, providing online toolkits and guidelines to help people around the world fledge their own repair projects. This is about scaling out, rather than scaling up – something that Ken Webster and Craig Johnson advocate in their latest book on regenerative and circular economies, ABC& D.

Systems thinking is at the heart of The Restart Project’s approach, going upstream to understand the root causes of the problems, and Fiona tells us about some of their data collection on common faults.

It was fascinating to hear about how people’s mindsets are changing, and how a simple repair can spark all sorts of positive effects.