The Restart Project Podcast

Our Top 5 Good News Stories for the year, about design, economics, business, policy, and... the children, our future! From New York to Brussels to Ghana and even Russia... Anywhere there's a yay! (And sometimes a yay-boo). We talked Apple, Fairphone, the role of European policy, and how to "hack" formal education.

Our favourite waste campaign slogan is quite simple: There is no "away". So where is this "away"? And this is what podcaster Dave Pickering finds out on a roadtrip to Kent, to a recycling plant in Sittingbourne. At Sweeep, the largest plant of its kind in southern England, Dave sees what happens to our small gadgets and appliances when they are taken to be recycled. The process of recouping raw ma...

In this show we talked about Adele's flip phone, and why it caused such an uproar. "Retro" electronics seem to be all the rage, but why? Music and sound seem to be one area where we continue to have an emotional bond to the electronics we listen with, but also the physical media itself, even in a digital age. We talked about the enduring appeal of not just vinyl, but CDs and radios - many of which...

In this show, we discussed with Restarter Dave Lukes the "Big Fix", Hackney's festival of repair taking place this Saturday, featuring a Restart Party, as well as bike, furniture, fabric repair workshops and much more. We then spoke to Restarter Orsetta Hosquet about a US laptop refurbisher turned artist, inspired by the glitches produced by faulty video cards he was substituting. This made us thi...

In this show, we discussed the true meaning of "digital inclusion" - what does it mean to have an online device, when we can perceive helplessly that it "rots" before our eyes? With Restarter Dave Lukes, we asked if statistics about device ownership, numbers of people online, really mean anything if we are becoming mere passive receivers of information and playing catch-up to access key online-onl...

On our show this week, we had a special guest, Alison from The Goodlife Centre, a workshop and learning centre not far from Resonance FM's London studios in Borough. Through her thriving business, Alison has helped thousands of Londoners learn about DIY, electricals, plumbing and making/repairing furniture. She tells the story of some "dollhouse DIY" as a child and how her love of materials and pr...

On our show this week, we talked about connections between Restarters and repairing bikes. We spoke to longtime Restarter Ten, who shared the story of his legendary repair of a vintage coffee grinder in Herne Hill market. Ten was joined in the studio by another of our committed volunteers, Dave. They share a passion for fixing and for bicycles, so we discussed the difference between repairing bike...

For a special Ada Lovelace Day discussion, we talked to Orsetta, a long time Restarter talked to us about how she got started tinkering and fixing. She was one of only two girls in her secondary school carpentry course, helping to break barriers. But first, we discussed two techie tidbits: first, the news that Apple finally relented and announced it would help frustrated owners of delaminated Macb...

In this episode, we discuss commercial repair of gadgets, electronics and home appliances. Most of us can testify, it feels less and less of a possibility these days. Podcaster Dave Pickering interviews designer and writer John Thackara about how this may be a "temporary blip". He paints a picture of what local, (re)emergent economies of repair might look like. Thackara's new book How To Thrive in...

We discussed the allegations that Samsung has been cheating on energy efficiency testing. We talked about transparency, trust for manufacturers, and exactly when energy efficiency concerns are still worth obsessing over. We also discussed "brand Germany", discussing a BBC profile of Miele, a manufacturer of long-lasting appliances, and other quality German brands that sold their image to other les...

We actually did talk about some shiny shiny gadgets - two very game-changing projects in the area of modular, repairable design. But first, Restarter Dave Lukes told us about a printer repair, well a deep clean, and what it is like to repair at a "Give and Take" event. Then we discussed the new Fairphone 2 (which will go into production soon, yay) and Runcible, example of "heirloom electronics" st...

This week, we talked with Restarter Dave Lukes about a wind-up radio he recently repaired and about the importance of running Restart Parties in shopping malls, and to podcaster Dave Pickering about people's motivation to keep repairing. Then we discussed Amazon's tablet six-pack and software support for the first Fairphone.

This is the first episode of our live radio show, broadcast every Tuesday at 1:30pm here in London on Resonance 104.4 FM and always online. Our show is about gadgets but it's definitely different. We're not going talk about the shiny shiny new things we want you to buy. We'll focus on the value of the things we already have and how to value them longer. This week, we talked with Restarter Ben Skid...

Before a smartphone reaches us, most of the greenhouse gas emissions it will ever make have already been made. Podcaster Dave Pickering finds at Restart Party that people struggle to express the impacts of our gadgets in terms that relate to climate change. Then Dave speaks with Craig Jones, an expert in the area of carbon footprinting - modelling environmental impacts of everything from buildings...

Podcaster Dave Pickering interviews Adrian Smith, University of Sussex Professor of Technology and Society, who can help us put our fixing into broader perspective. We learn that community repair is embedded in a larger context of bottom-up responses to economic, ecological and technological change. Smith describes the Lucas Plan of the late 1970s (check out this documentary for more) and early te...

Product designer Barry Waddilove helps explain to Dave why these gadgets frustrate: what goes into their production, how many different pressures and forces determine design decisions, and how new thinking in design could truly transform our relationship with electronics. Barry is adamant that a waste-nothing "circular economy" can be one where careful resource use (and re-use) will lead to future...

This is the first in a series produced by brilliant podcaster Dave Pickering, based on real fixes, heartbreaks and wisdom shared at our community repair events - called Restart Parties - here in London. This podcast is for you if you would like to fix your relationship with electronics. Let's rethink, restart. We plan to go into real depth about good and bad design, obstacles to repair of electron...