Context
One of the goals in Sharepair is to design, develop and test an ‘Interactive repair tool’: an online tool to be managed by repair organisations, for repair communities and repairers, enhancing the repair activities of repairers during repair events, and stimulating data collection.
In the first half of 2020, project partners Maakbaar Leuven and Statik had several discussions with organisations from the repair community, in order to define the actual user requirements for such an online tool for repair. Research was done on existing tools, and repairers were interviewed and asked for their ideas of what would work and what would not.
Several aspects came out very clearly:
- asking repairers to use online tools is not an evident thing: any tool made has to provide some clear benefits to repairers and help them in their own repair processes, otherwise they won't use it
- the time and effort needed from repairers to use such a tool, should be al low as possible
- the concrete jobs-to-be-done in a Repair Café are a good starting point to look for optimisation of existing workflows
COVID-19 changes plans, welcome Repair Connects!
Whereas the ideas for an online repair tool covering many aspects of the Repair Café workflows were in full progress, suddenly, our team could hardly gather any more feedback from repair groups in action. Repair events could no longer be organised, since all physical events were cancelled.
Maakbaar Leuven jumped on the occasion, slightly redirecting its focus. The goal: to develop at full-speed that part of the repair tool, that would allow the group to continue repairing during COVID-times. In less than 2 months, version 1 of Repair Connects was launched.
