New research project

It’s January and the project just started. We’re going to spend two years investigating mobile/smartphone repair places, from unlicensed shops to hackerspaces and on-line resources.

To give you a little background, this project emerged of my (Nicolas) own research about smartphone usage. Listening to users and spending time with them observing how they made sense of such artifacts, I realized how repair and maintenance practices play an fundamental role in daily usage. Reading David Edgerton’s book “The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History” in Cuba at the time, and observing how the island was quite resourceful in terms of mobile phone repair practices, I realized that it would be an interesting topic to investigate in Switzerland. This led me to do a preliminary set of observations in Geneva, Marseilles, Lyon and Paris, which helped framing the main research questions of the project.