Maintainers III: Policy, Practice, and Care

This panel combines different visions for how to move maintenance research and practice forward including maintenance pedagogy; maintenance community design; organizational investments in preventative maintenance; artistic vehicles for centering maintenance labor; and imagining alternative border futures through critical play. After a brief introduction to our panelists’ work, we will engage in a facilitated discussion to explore shared themes, address challenges posed, and offer up concrete actions to co-create a more caring and well-maintained world.

Paper Abstracts

Juan Llamas-Rodriguez: "The Sewer Transnationalists: Sewage Maintenance and Designing Cooperation in the Border Region"

The Sewer Transnationalists is a critical speculative design project that redesigns the border region from the perspective of sewage flows. Taking the form of a cooperative board game (in the style of Pandemic or Forbidden Island), the project tasks users with solving the problem of sewage disposal across the border. Users take on the role of a different stakeholder (e.g. IBWC bureaucrats, pipe engineers, border citizen) and each turn they choose to undertake an action within their area of expertise. However, this is not a fully finished game. It allows users to rethink the structures of the board, including the map, as way to improve their chances at solving the sewage problem. The major obstacle turns out not to be winning the game (as in, fixing the sewage problem) but creating the conditions for which winning the game is possible at all. Following on critical design principles, the goal of the project is to engage users in thinking through the conceptual frameworks undergirding current solution attempts. The game itself functions first as a medium through which such frameworks can be tested and contested and second as a platform where speculative alternatives can be tried out.

Jilly Traganou: "Maintenance in Autonomy: Christiania’s Self-managed Infrastructures"

The paper will focus on infrastructural making and caretaking in Christiania Free Town. Christiania is an autonomous district of approximately 1,000 residents, established in 1971 as a squat in a former military area of Copenhagen. Christiania's self‐government is based on assemblies and consensual decision-making. After a 2004 Danish law forced Christiania to change its status to a foundation, initiating the treatment of its members as individuals, a period of “normalization” began, signaling a transition from “insurgent autonomy” to “regulated autonomy.” Christianites throughout their history have handled tasks like kindergartens, postal services, green areas and most infrastructural provision and maintenance in a self-organized manner. In the last years, Christiania undertook a plan of legalizing and renovating houses, as well as maintaining and further developing its infrastructure in accordance to a community-developed Green Plan. The paper will be based on material I collected as a researcher in residence in Christiania in the fall of 2018. Christiania has important lessons to offer both in its insurgent and regulated autonomy stages. Having been framed by the state as a “social experiment,” in my analysis, Christiania’s first era can be seen as a case of a prefigurative political action, based primarily on what I call “embodied infrastructures.”

Hong-An Wu: "Collective Technological Repair: Proposal for Pedagogical Practices"

As digital media making becomes increasingly popularized in K12 and community learning classrooms, art and media educators are faced with not only mastering digital technologies for curricular planning but also improvising with these disobedient objects during pedagogical exchanges. Drawing from my five-weeks action research project teaching digital art making, specifically video game modifications, with teens in a library setting, this paper examines repeated moments of technological breakdowns during teaching practices. Instead of interpreting these moments as failures, abandoning the objects, and resorting to a backup curriculum using analog technologies, I argue for developing a feminist pedagogical reorienting of teaching practices that utilize reparation to de-center these challenges. Instead of resorting to a backup curriculum when technologies break down in the classroom and placing the responsibility of maintenance and care of these machines solely on the instructor, I argue that technological troubleshooting should be oriented at the center of any curriculum. Repair in the form of troubleshooting not only requires domain-specific knowledge, but it also embodies acts of care that are often deprioritized under consumerist logic. When students are invited to the practice of repair in the classroom, they engage in inquiry-based learning around the domain-specific literacies as well as engage in shared risk, responsibility, and ownership of the curriculum and machines utilized.

Alex Reiss Sorokin: "From “Run it ‘til it breakes” to Preventative Care: Innovation in Repair and Maintenance Work"

“Run it ‘til it breakes” used to be the model of maintenance work at a large research university. Most maintenance work focused on reactive maintenance, the repair and replacement of broken pieces of equipment. With increased funding and outside consulting, the university decided to focus more on preventative maintenance. Rather than changing how repair and maintenance work is done, the university administration decided to establish a new team according to a new model, focused on preventative maintenance. Two teams of repairmen are now in charge of repair and maintenance, dividing the campus buildings and student dorms between them. Alongside the new model, new technologies for gathering data were implemented in both teams. This paper examines the two models in rhetoric and practice. First, I delve into the background of the two models. I tell the story of how optimization and professionalization led to a stronger focus on preventative maintenance and customer satisfaction. Second, based on ethnographic work, I describe how the organizational change looks like and feels like on the ground – from the perspective of the tradesmen who do maintenance work. While innovation and maintenance are often thought as opposites, this paper argues that sometimes innovation and maintenance need one another.

Kelly Pendergrast: "Visual Pleasure and Maintenance Cinema"

What does maintenance look like? Often it doesn’t look like much. The infrastructure, repair, and care work that supports the systems we rely on are both essential and hidden from view. Janitors clean the hallways after the offices have shut down for the day. Archivists toil in temperature-controlled basements. And even if this work is visible, it tends towards the unspectacular. Aside from a few exceptions, this comparative invisibility extends to the world of cinema and art. All of this means that maintenance is lacking a visual language. This paper investigates the ways we visualize maintenance in our cultural imagination and cultural production. Through a brief analysis of films—from Kings of the Road to Jeanne Dielman—that foreground maintenance work and maintenance workers, I argue that representing maintenance in film and art is an important, even revolutionary act. Drawing on theories of visual culture along with literature about representations of labor in film and art history, I argue that cinema and art can be essential contributors to a necessary reframing and valorizing of maintenance labor.

Abstracts may be edited due to character limits

Maintenance is work, and any consideration of maintenance and maintainers must put considerations of labor front and center. This panel features advocates, organizers, and scholars who approach labor from a variety of perspectives. They share a passion for a deeper understanding of maintenance work--who performs it, under what conditions, and how it is recognized--as well as an appreciation that more robust forms of organizing and advocacy will lead to better outcomes for maintainers and for society as a whole.

Lightning Talk Round

Speaker, Titles, and Abstracts

Laura James: Festival of Maintenance: A Celebration of Those who Maintain Different Parts of Our World

A celebration of those who maintain different parts of our world, and how they do it, recognizing the often hidden work done in repair, custodianship, stewardship, tending and caring for the things that matter. The Festival of Maintenance is a non-profit community event, run by volunteers.

Yuan Yi: Female Machine Operators and the Maintenance of the Factory System

Through a case study of Dasheng Cotton Mills, one of the most successful enterprises in Republican China (1912-1949), this paper examines the skill of the allegedly “unskilled” female spinning machine operators, arguing for their significance as the maintainer of the factory system. An archetype of modern industrial workforces, factory workers was once a popular topic among social historians and feminist scholars in the China field, and yet the majority of cotton mill workers have been categorized as “unskilled laborers”, regardless of their work experience. I aim to rectify this neglect in response to a recent call for attention to technology-in-use or, more specifically, the study of maintenance. By focusing on sites where machines were used, repaired, and maintained, we can bring back the often neglected technical experts such as mechanics for a better understanding of the history of technology. However, if we broaden the boundaries of maintenance from the narrowly defined machine work such as lubrication and gear change to any human activities to keep machines and systems properly working, it becomes obvious that the operator’s role as a maintainer was no less important than that of a mechanic. Their primary job was piecing broken threads on the spinning machines, and by doing so they were essentially correcting the inherent imperfection of the machines, which did not come with an automatic mechanism for joining yarn ends. In other words, the spinning machines could never perform their function—to produce long, continuous yarn—without the handwork of experienced operators, which required not only delicate and agile movements but also a technical understanding of the given machines. It was the skill of these workers that maintained the factory system.

Daniel Wilk: Innovations in Maintenance at the Hotel Pennsylvania

This is the centennial year of the Hotel Pennsylvania, once the largest hotel in the world, across Seventh Avenue from Penn Station in New York City. Its hundredth birthday, and no one threw it a party or a parade, not even the hotel itself. The Hotel Pennsylvania is probably the most important hotel of the twentieth century. The great hotels of the nineteenth century, in America and elsewhere, had striven for size, luxury, more hotel “servants” providing an increasingly varied list of services. At the end of that century and into the twentieth, hotelier E. M. Statler brought the service sector into the age of Henry Ford, finding economies of scale that brought down costs and prices, and opened a huge new market in the middle class. Statler found some of his economies of scale in clever design that reduced maintenance labor. Unlike Henry Ford’s assembly line, which squeezed more work out of people at a faster pace, Statler’s innovations tended to create true efficiencies. For plumbers, he developed the Statler plumbing shaft, which ran shafts that encased water and heating pipes straight up and down buildings, stacking bathrooms on top of each other in identical layouts floor by floor, with easy access to the pipes behind the bathroom mirrors. For chambermaids, he designed a line of sheets that had one-inch hems on singles and two-inch hems on doubles, so no labor was lost on un- and re-folding the wrong sheet. In this talk, I will outline Paran Stevens’ innovations in maintenance design, and also talk about my failed attempts to get the Hotel Pennsylvania to celebrate its centennial year with commemorative shower curtains, immersive theater, and The Roots playing Glenn Miller’s hit “Pennsylvania 6-5000” (still the hotel’s phone number) on the Jimmy Fallon show.

Danielle Bovenberg: Keeping Scientific Equipment of Various Ages Running in a Nanotechnology Laboratory

A challenge for equipment technicians working in materials science laboratories is taking care of machines produced in different periods. Nanoscale processing “tools” -- the machines that chipmakers use -- built in the 1980s, 1990s and early 2000s are expensive and robust, and are therefore still widely in use in academic laboratories today (Sperling, 2013). As a consequence, laboratory management in this field is as much about servicing individual pieces of equipment as managing a portfolio of equipment of different technology generations (Gates, Johnson & McDaniel, 2015). For those who maintain this array of tools, challenges posed by old equipment include equipment vendors that have gone out of business, discontinued product lines, unavailable parts, and a dwindling base of maintenance expertise. This paper examines how equipment engineers at one university Nanofabrication facility overcome these obstacles in order to keep old tools running, so that university and industry researchers can continue using them. The paper is based on an ongoing ethnographic study of the laboratory’s 15-person equipment staff. The paper explores how equipment engineers view the “age” of the machines they service, what challenges they experience, and how they seek to overcome these challenges. The paper discusses engineers’ engagement with the second-hand equipment market, the strategic modification of old tools in order to create as much similarity in servicing needs as possible, the stockpiling of parts and duplicate machines, and the specific instructions engineers give to the users of their equipment to circumvent the vulnerabilities of the various machines. The paper also discusses tensions and challenges that remain, despite these efforts.

​David Kalman: Maintenance in Jewish Thought

This paper is an attempt to open a conversation between historians of technology and religious studies on the topic of maintenance, a concept which is new to the former but has long between central to the latter. In this talk, I intend to speak briefly on two key areas that are worthy of further study. As a historian of Judaism, I will focus on Jewish thought in particular. First, there is maintenance in the realm of theology. In many religious traditions, the notion of God as a powerful creator is a central dogma, one which motivates obedience towards the diety. While the notion of God-as-creator is frequently associated with the divine ability to bring new items into being (“Let there be light,” and so on), many religious traditions contain the idea that God’s creativity is expressed in the upkeep of the world itself. I will outline several instances in which the God-as-maintainer concept is expressed and attempt to determine why the idea is stronger at certain times than at others. Second, I will speak about maintenance as a religious value, one which is central for understanding how religious norms evolve in a changing culture. In Judaism, maintenance is frequently associated with “tradition.” Not infrequently, maintenance has led Judaism to preserve technologies long after they had been replaced, in the process transforming those technologies into religious symbols. Witness, for example, the Torah scroll, which has not been the latest in book technology for almost 2000 years. I will explore several ways in which maintenance leads to religious meaning.

The goal of this workshop is to create a conversation among policy makers, activists and researchers about the different ways communities take on maintenance and stewardship responsibilities for open spaces in cities. Although upwards of 90% of the cost of open space is in maintenance, and only 10% on initial construction, cities struggle to find funding for ongoing care. In recent decades cities have turned to communities and private entities to take on this work. This has been organized through a variety of mechanisms–everything from park advisory councils and friends groups to land trusts, privately operated public places and conservancies. How are those relationships organized, funded and enforced? What are the benefits and pitfalls of shifting maintenance responsibilities from the public to perform key open space functions?  In this workshop we will begin with a brief presentation exploring the nuances of several different approaches to open space maintenance through real life examples from across the country. Then through a small group activity we will create our own community based governance models for an imagined scenario. This activity is designed to facilitate explorations of the relationship between open space maintenance and other sectors such as economic and community development, mental health and education. In the shift to community responsibility we shift from treating open space maintenance as a simple means to an end and begin to see open space maintenance as a means to tackle other problems and provide opportunities (local jobs, sense of place, social cohesion, youth programs, etc). Our hope is  to lay out the possibility for innovation in the open space maintenance sector. It also brings to the fore the millions of community-based volunteers and staff who participate in the maintenance of urban landscape is a daily/weekly practice.

Target Audience

Policy makers, activists and researchers interested in delving into the nuances of the policy tools used to organize communities maintenance of public places.

Key Learning Objectives

Our goal is first to understand the benefits/pitfalls and actors involved in different ways communities take on maintenance and stewardship responsibilities for open spaces in cities. Second, through the hands on exercise, we hope to use the cross-disciplinary opportunity to better understand the relationship between open space maintenance and other sectors as well as exploring new strategies for organizing localized maintenance.

Workshop Structure/Agenda

25 minutes presentation of case studies followed by 25 minutes governance design exercise and report back.

The lawyer of the popular imagination may not be a maintainer. But law is a service profession, and the role of many lawyers is to one of keeping trouble from happening rather than intervening after it does. Public defenders may examine the social and legal needs of their clients in order to limit the collateral consequences of criminal charges. In-house counsel might provide legal advice when developing a project to sidestep legal issues, rather than waiting for a lawsuit to drop. Maintenance is the everyday work of lawyers, whether they represent organizations or individuals. And lawyers whose work is preventing problems from happening have to focus on care-work and relationship-building rather than adversarial approaches. Unfortunately, these skills are rarely valued or brought into focus by the legal community, which valorizes the same high stakes proceedings as the popular media. Lawyering as Maintenance will explore how (some) lawyering is maintenance work, and how the carework that defines maintenance lawyering is undervalued by even those within the field. The panel will look at how care is coded by gender and race within the legal profession, and how established practices and hierarchies (such as the billable hour or the focus on appellate work) discourage maintenance. Rather than focusing on one area of law in particular, Lawyering as Maintenance will bring together diverse areas of practice. Public defenders, trademark practitioners, immigration attorneys will reflect upon what they maintain and how care work is integrated into their everyday practices.

How buildings age, weather, and decay -- and how we keep them going by cleaning, maintaining, and repairing them -- is rarely addressed in design studios in schools of architecture. What if we were to acknowledge impermanence as an emblematic condition of buildings? Would this shift in perspectives bring to our attention issues we currently overlook? What if we considered what happens to building in and over time? Could exploring different kinds of time and duration (cycles of use, rates of material decay, stylistic currency, diurnal rhythms) enrich the design process as well as the design proposals that result? Would this awareness prompt us to keep daily cleaning, regular maintenance, and periodic repair in mind as we select materials, develop details, and consider finishes?  This paragraph is taken from a recent architectural design studio brief that introduced daily cleaning, regular maintenance, and periodic repair into the mix. In order to give these issues sustained traction within the studio design process, professionals from the campus facilities management department as well as architecture firms participated in the studio. The conversations were surprisingly easy and quite enlightening -- every one, including the students was invested in thinking through and imagining what lay downstream in order to recalibrate or rework their decisions.  The proposed panel discussion builds upon and extends this conversation by problematizing the continuities and disconnects between pedagogy (design instruction), practice (design firms), and maintenance (facilities management). The participants are: Roy Decker of Duvall Decker, an award-winning practice based in Jackson, Mississippi, that also offers on-going maintenance and maintenance planning to their clients; Jamie Ready, a civil engineer who oversees facilities maintenance operations for Georgia Tech; and Sabir Khan, a professor in the College of Design who teaches design to students in architecture, engineering, and industrial design.

Paper Titles and Abstracts

Keojin Jin

When approaching building design, architects consider only the elements of the present time. However, like humans, each building has a unique, undetermined life span. Despite the efforts of governments to quantify and generalize the life spans of structures, it is in fact a complex task to determine the expected duration of a building’s life span, as many factors impact its resulting life span. The type of construction methods that were established to meet the steep increases in urban populations during the post war period resulted in a decreased life expectancy for buildings. As the growth reach its limits, methods that were designed to keep pace with growth periods create collisions within the changing environments. This tension is especially pronounced in structures designed quickly to meet an urgent population need, but with minimal forethought given to the building’s duration and the ensuing environmental ramification at the end of its brief lifespan. Replacing these structure is expensive: if we continue the present convention of developing new cities with method of construction that only meets its short term needs, we will be both financially and ecologically bankrupt due to the high environmental toll of such short-life span buildings. Therefore, developing a proactive set of city planning which takes account of its long-term impact of increasing the duration the building’s life span from its early city planning stage will be a critical strategy for preventing the ensuing crisis of large scale building obsolescence as urban areas progress proceeds through the future era of growth stabilization. For better articulation of the ecological impact of the short-term obsolescence of the typology driven mainly by distributor driven by economic/ political motives, this study performs emergy (spelled with an “m”) synthesis study of the Jam-sil district development plan in Seoul.

Vyta Baselice: Concrete Breakdown: Maintaining the Material of Permanence

The Portland Cement Association, the concrete industry's principal trade organization, marketed its product since the early decades of the twentieth century with the motto, “Concrete for Permanence.” It imagined that since this new medium was manufactured using scientific principles, including their application in distribution, merchandising, standardization, engineering, and even sack handling, concrete environments would not have to be maintained. We now know this advertising was terribly misleading as concrete infrastructure in the United States and abroad continues to crumble and demand extensive investment. Using several historical case studies, this paper examines the concrete industry's changing attitudes toward maintenance throughout the long twentieth century and its contemporary takes on the longevity of its material. 

Lightning Talk Round

Speakers, Titles, and Abstracts

Angelyn Chandler: Historic Districts: A call for equity

Hudson, New York, was established in 1783, as a whaling port. The form of the city is a grid of five blocks north to south, by nine blocks stretching east from the Hudson River. Despite removing blocks of historic fabric in the working class section of town during a period of urban renewal in the 1970s, Hudson is more-or-less an eighteenth and nineteenth-century city architecturally. Hudson has six historic districts, all of which exclude the urban renewal area and other historically intact sections in the working class areas—generally the north side of town--due to “deficiencies in architectural integrity and distinction”. The north side—roughly one quarter of the city--may not consist of high architecture, but underneath the alterations and dilapidation is a fabric that tells the story of the working class of Hudson. Because this area was left out of the historic districting, the homes there are not eligible for state historic tax credits which could significantly lower the cost of renovation and maintenance. This exclusion ensures that only the fabric—and the history--of the wealthier areas survives. When this exclusion has been challenged by homeowners and preservationists, renters who fear gentrification have shut the challengers down. By limiting access to financial and technical resources for maintenance and renovation to only those properties within a historic district, Hudson’s historic districting prioritizes the fabric of the wealthier neighborhoods and makes that of the rest of the city sacrificial. Maintenance thus becomes a political weapon to reinforce a particular cultural identity. But we can no longer tell only one story: the buildings of all of us should be valued and maintained.

Brandon Benevento: Representing Maintenance: Upkeep as Critical Reading and Writing Practice

Representation of maintenance offers authors writing practice that allows plotting of social/systemic criticism via direct representation of individuals working in specific settings. A recent illustration: HBO’s Succession, depicting a Fox-like media empire, begins with a maid scrubbing the founder’s urine from a rug after he mistakes the location of a bathroom. Using maintenance, the scene immediately establishes criticism of wealth. Weightier examples abound. Richard Wright uses maintenance jobs in Native Son to reveal black labor, far from the factory, as a systemic base. Across the political spectrum, Sloan Wilson’s The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit puts a nanny into the foreground only to make her wage demands a source of victimization of the white male protagonist, just another thing the breadwinner must keep up with. The reverse side of the writing-practice argument is that examining maintenance in texts provides critic's a powerful reading tool for illuminating political, social, racial, sexual and economic commitments and confusions. While facilitating detailed, intersectional readings based upon minute depictions of work, the greatest value of maintenance as an analytic device is simplicity. In accessible fashion, maintenance yields a few direct questions: Who and what maintains? Who and what is maintained? In terms of the practice of maintenance studies, “Maintenance,” as analytic tool (as much as a bundle of types of work) helps navigate a major tension in my own research and thinking. Maintenance registers as deeply undervalued and exploited and yet as fulfilling, interconnecting, creative, work. While I have little in the way of “solving” this bind, applying such dual-sidedness as an analytic concept has a lot to offer studies of literature, culture and labor. More importantly, it helps articulate actual positive and negative qualities of work, even in mixed up form.

Matt Battles: The Careful Archipelago: Performing Maintenance in the Penguin Exhibit

We talk of performing maintenance; how do we confront its performativity? I bring this question to bear on my own experience as a maintainer during six months I spent volunteering with the penguin crew at the New England Aquarium—where care is enacted, among birds as bodies and communities, under conditions of notable theatricality. An interdependence is woven in the exhibit's waters, a performance of what Donna Haraway (2003) calls "significant otherness," in which care-ful human labors unfold in relation to nonhuman flourishing. This enactment of care stands apart from the Aquarium's interpretive program, which emphasizes ecology and exotic marine otherness. The exhibit is framed with placards that tell of evolution and reproduction, of populations threatened by climate change; wall-mounted maps indicate the far-flung islands where colonies perch. But the archipelago that Aquarium penguins occupy is stranger than any mapped there: an ecological niche framed and enacted—scrubbed clean—by the performance of maintenance. My talk for the Maintainers conference will tease out and frame this enjambment of interpretation and the performance of care, with special attention to the public mise-en-scene of maintenance.

Varun Adibhatla: The Guild of Leaks, Cracks, and Holes

The guild is an invitation to create a community of art, evidence, kinship, and practice around an ethos of Maintenance to share with, entertain, and inform a world preoccupied with moving fast and breaking things in the public realm. This lighting talking introduces the guild's aspirational coat of arms.

Justin Shapiro: Decent, Safe, and Sanitary? Kenilworth Courts and the Envirotechnical Failures of Public Housing in Washington, D.C. (Advance Copy PDF Below)

Throughout his career, John Ihlder sought “decent, safe, and sanitary” housing for the poorest residents of the District of Columbia. During his tenure as head of the National Capital Housing Authority he oversaw the establishment and growth of Washington’s public housing program. Despite his vision, ultimately Washington’s public housing agency was unable to deliver such beneficial housing to its poorest residents. This discussion details one particular case study, that of Kenilworth Courts. By doing so, I will highlight the envirotechnical forces that determined the negative public health outcomes at Kenilworth Courts.

Abstracts may be edited due to character limits

Mending, a critical skill of garment maintenance, has a long history and multiple cultural associations ranging from the practicality of thrift, gendered domestic labor, and preservation of artifacts, to assertion of individuality and symbol of protest.  This workshop brings together perspectives on mending from history, museum practice, and contemporary social movements along with a guided hands-on session, and asks the maintainers community to reflect on the contemporary relationship between people and their clothing:  How can practices of maintenance promote agency within the lifecycle of clothing, from its production to “end of life”, and what broader implications exist for our communities? Participants in this session are invited to bring their own items of clothing in need of mending with them to the workshop, which will conclude with instruction in mending and darning techniques, with time to mend clothing together.

Target Audience

People engaged in the fields of textiles, fashion, conservation, materials history, STS, craft enthusiasts, menders - anyone who washes, cares for, or wears clothes!

Key Learning Objectives

-Reflect upon the lifecycle of one’s own clothing
-Understand contemporary mending practices within a longer historical frame
-Discuss one’s own clothing maintenance practices
-Analyze the role of current fashion industries in one’s own clothing maintenance or mending practices
-Apply mending practices to a personal item

Workshop Structure/Agenda

The first half of this workshop will consist of a presentation on the social relevance of modern mending, punctuated throughout by activities where attendees will have the chance to reflect on and discuss their own clothing maintenance practices in groups with others. At the end of the workshop, attendees will be invited to mend a piece of their own clothing in community with each other.

The twin abilities to repair and recycle products are deeply intertwined: unrepairable products are often also unrecyclable. In this panel, we’ll consider the role of Right-to-Repair and recycling practices in environmental sustainability and the Circular Economy. We’ll here from Right-to-Repair advocates, waste management leaders, and grassroots community workers holding Repair Cafes and building tool libraries to help and teach others to care for their goods. Ultimately, we’ll work to answer the question: how do we create a more repairable, recyclable, and sustainable future?