The Restart Project Podcast

Janet and Ugo talk with Estefania Suquilanda, who is introducing repair into a school in New York City. We then discuss Apple's recent claims on being zero waste and the Right to Repair movement in California. We are very interested in spreading the culture of repair from an early age, so it was great to hear about Estef's work. She is the current Tech Support Specialist at The Hewitt School, a gi...

Janet and Neil interview Goldsmiths Political Economy Lecturer Derek Wall about his new book "Elinor Ostrom's Rules for Radicals", based on the fascinating and lesser known story of Elinor Ostrom: the only woman to have won a Nobel Prize for Economics. We discuss Ostrom’s view of the "commons" and how people can organise themselves to manage community resources. Our interest in the commons comes f...

In this week's episode, we talk to artists Joshua Portway and Lise Autogena about their documentary ‘Kuannersuit / Kvanefjeld’, about a small town in Greenland that is divided over plans for a large, open-pit uranium and rare earth mineral mine. The proposed mine would be the world's fifth largest uranium mine and the second largest rare earths operation. Josh and Lise, who have been working toget...

We're trying something new. Our volunteers are a crucial part of our work at Restart, and frequently appear as guests on our show. This week, and once a month from this week onwards, we hand them the reins. This is a volunteer "takeover". Dave Lukes and Ben Skidmore are two passionate tinkerers and repairers who are equally fascinated by the wider ecological and community benefits of repair. They...

On International World Radio Day, Ugo is joined by Restart volunteer Ben Skidmore to discuss the future of FM radio, and the future of electronics manufacturing more broadly in a post-Brexit world. The landscape of electronics design and manufacture is always changing, but today we discuss several developments and shifts that are particularly significant. Firstly, our friends at iFixit published a...

This week we talk to Josh Lepawksy - Associate Professor in Geography at the Memorial University of Newfoundland - about his work in the field of 'Discard Studies', which examines the way in which discards (waste) move through the world at local and global scales. Josh's research is specifically focused on electronic waste — his new book 'Reassembling Rubbish' (MIT Press) contains the insights gai...

Medicine has been revolutionised by technology that goes on - and in - our body. In these cases, questions of durability and reliability can become matters of life and death. From the artificial pancreas to the edible robot, we think about the role that repair and ongoing product support have in the medical technology (med-tech) industry. Today, we hear from Jon about his own 'artificial pancreas'...

Today on Restart Radio, Ugo and Neil talk to Charlie Bruce and Tom Putnam from Beeline: a smart compass for cycling. A simple piece of hardware that displays simply an arrow and distance, Beeline removes the hassle of interpreting an entire map while you're on the go. And it costs about the same as an average smartphone screen repair: which is often the price of badly designed smartphone brackets...

In our first monthly Restart Podcast of the year, Dave talks to Leyla Acaroglu: self-described designer, systems thinker and sustainability provocateur. Leyla's energy is contagious as she talks us through her methods for designing not just useful and effective products, but also new systems and social conventions. Having grown frustrated with the ways in which traditional education prioritises li...

In our first radio show of 2018, we cover a range of topics: from learning about modularity through flatpack electronics, to the recent Apple battery scandal, to the even more recent news concerning Spectre and Meltdown: two recently discovered flaws that mean owners of electronic products everywhere are facing major vulnerabilities. Ugo and Restarter Panda Méry are joined by Janet to discuss the...

The soaring value of Bitcoin has been all over the media recently. But what is Bitcoin, and especially what is the environmental cost of 'mining' it? Bitcoin is the largest of a series of emerging 'cryptocurrencies' - forms of digital currency that operate by way of decentralized networks. Because users are not identified by their name, but instead by their 'public key', they originally attracted...

In the lead up to Christmas, commuters around London are being bombarded with advertisements for voice-controlled home assistants - in particular the Amazon Echo. Today, we talk about the business model behind the device, our concerns about the rate of its sales, and the questions that the Echo raises about who benefits in the future of machine learning. The Amazon Echo bears many similarities to...

You can tell a lot about a person from their data: from the places they go, to the length of their work-out, to their preferred breakfast cereal. And with this amount of private information stored inside an iPhone or a computer, it isn't surprising that people are unwilling to hand them over to a recycler once they're no longer in-use. But is this a valid concern, considering that we hand this inf...

Lewis Dartnell, fellow of astrobiology at the University of Leicester, asked himself a difficult question. If tomorrow we woke up and all the technologies we had come to depend on had ceased to exist, what knowledge would we need to re-build them from scratch? The book that came out of his research, called 'The Knowledge: How to Rebuild our World from Scratch', explores the history and inner worki...

How many gadgets do you need to fix to break a world record? The repair café held in Cambridge earlier this month has set the new magic number: 232. Today, Ugo and Jon talk to Nicole Barton from Cambridge Carbon Footprint, who helped to organise the 'World's Biggest Repair Café' on Saturday the 11th of November. The event was held with the intention of surpassing the 150 repairs that took place in...

Today, Lauren and Ugo talk to John Bumstead - an artist and laptop refurbisher whose company 'RKDL Inc' (pronounced "Roadkill") gives a new life to old Apple Macbooks. Most Macbooks end up recycled - shredded for raw materials. According to John, many discarded Macbooks are only halfway through their lifetime at 5-7 years, and good for another half a decade or more, after a few tweaks. John trawls...

Japan has long been at the forefront of the design and manufacture of robot pets: from the Tamagotchi to the Sony Aibo. But how would these gadget-critters be received in the West, where we are less inclined to see the boundaries between animate and inanimate worlds as blurred? Lauren Collee is joined by Restart trustee Carolina Vallejo, who spends a couple of months in Japan each year as co-direc...

The rapidly-growing Internet of Things (IoT) takes multiple forms: some more useful than others. Broadly defined, the Internet of Things refers to anything that is traditionally 'dumb', but is manufactured to communicate - with other devices, or with the internet. A smart kettle, a smart toaster, or a smart central heating system all fall into this category. A world where gadgets can talk to each...

On the weekend of 6-8 of October, we hosted the first International Fixfest in London. It was an incredible chance for repairers, makers, activists, tinkerers and academics from all over the world to meet each other, share tips and stories, and come up with joint strategies for repairing into the future. Video recordings of many of the talks and unconference sessions from Fixfest are available on...

The greatest myth surrounding electronic repair - one that desperately needs busting - is that we can't repair at all. Most items when they break are repairable. But there are several persistent myths about DIY quick fixes that can harm rather than help an ailing electronic item. To kick off today's episode, we briefly discuss two pieces of tech news that caught our attention this week. In the wak...

This week, Restart Radio coincided with World Mental Health Day. We talk about how repair can contribute to greater social cohesion and individual well-being. Community repair events can be a great way of involving people who might otherwise feel isolated, but this takes some thought on the part of the organisers. Restarters Panda Méry and Dave Lukes share their thoughts with us about how spaces a...

This week's episode picks up where we left off last week, with part 2 of our podcast special with 'activist academic' Jack Qiu. In his new book 'Goodbye iSlave: a Manifesto for Digital Abolition', Jack argues that while slavery has certainly mutated from the horrific forms that it took in the 17th century, the systems of production and worker exploitation underpinning electronics manufacturing mus...

What do you know about the circumstances surrounding the production of your smartphone? For the majority of us, the answer is sadly 'not much' or 'I'd rather not know'. In this special 2-part episode, Jack Qiu - author of the book 'Goodbye iSlave: A Manifesto for Digital Abolition' - talks us through a story that has been largely neglected by the technology media. Many people think of slavery as h...

As summer draws to a close, we think about the role of tech in our experience of the 'Great Outdoors'. Taking a look at the useful, the useless, and the DIY, we think about how current consumer trends in camping and outdoor gear reflect the complicated nature of our desire to 'get away from it all'. Camping has always been a chance to get back to the bare essentials, but walking into a camp store...

Today, we talk to Rob Kerr from Lovefone - an independent mobile repair store - about the relationship between manufacturers and repairers. The appetite for smartphone repairs is growing: recently Carphone Dixons reported a decrease in sales due to people holding on to their phones for longer (bad news for them; great news for repairers... and for the planet!). Third-party repairers have always be...