Christopher Tidy was 10 years the first time he took apart an engine.
The carburetor, the block of machinery that supplies fuel and air to a gasoline engine and helps initiate ignition, was a disaster. It was blocked by thick layers of frozen fuel and dust. Tidy saw the problem and happened to have some tools nearby and was very curious about how exactly this worked and what she could do to fix it. This quickly turned into an attempt to “assemble a sort of Frankenstein engine” from parts of many discarded gasoline engines. He took the noisy machine apart piece by piece until he found the problem parts, then sprayed the carburetor with gasoline, followed by water and dish soap, and then scrubbed it with a toothbrush. The carburetor sat shiny and clean on his shelf until he sold it to someone looking for the right part.
Since then, Tidy has continued to be drawn to taking things apart with his hands, seeing how they work, and hopefully making them work better. He quickly realized that it is not always so easy to take something apart with joy.
Product repairability is an issue that is reaching its peak. Advocacy groups like iFixit and PIRG They have campaigned to make products more repairable in the US, Canada and around the world. In recent years, the European Union has advanced legislation that forces companies to let users repair their own devices. These efforts have led companies like Apple and Samsung to implement repair programs that make it easier for customers to repair their own phones, tablets, and other small electronic devices. Still, humans generate an astronomical amount of waste every day, mainly because we tend to throw away broken things instead of figuring out how to reuse or repair them.
Tidy wants to help with that process and address it from the source: focusing on the design of the product and trying to provide a framework for how to steer it in a more fixable direction.
Since taking apart that first engine, Tidy has focused on fixing things throughout his career in engineering and academia. (Apart from a brief excursion in the late 1990s in which he helped design a robot bent on destruction for the program robot wars.) He studied mechanical engineering at the University of Cambridge and then taught engineering and worked on projects in schools in Germany, Russia, and at MIT’s Field and Space Robotics Laboratory in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Tidy, now 42, runs a volunteer repair shop in Ladybrand, South Africa. It’s not a business, just a space he uses to tinker or help others repair their lamps, vans and toasters.
After years in that shop, Tidy has put together some great ideas on how to build more repairable products.
think different
Tidy hopes to inspire product designers to focus on creating long-lasting products from Jump. It’s an endeavor he understands after a career designing products and seeing how pointless the process is. The problem is that a product designer has to bring a product to market at a certain price and with a certain development budget, and what they must prioritize does not always translate into a lasting final product. Mechanical engineers developing a product may feel like they are being pulled in many different directions, Tidy says, focusing primarily on consumer preferences, manufacturing speed and keeping costs low. It is often forgotten to design with repair in mind. Tidy wanted to do something to fix it.