Repair Café chooses Digital Natives

Repair Café brings repairing back into society

Repair Cafés are free meetings where neighborhood residents, together with expert volunteers, repair broken items such as clothing, appliances, or bicycles. Visitors bring their broken items from home and work on them on-site. In a time when repair knowledge is disappearing and many items are unnecessarily discarded, Repair Cafés bring repairing back into society in an accessible, modern, and above all fun way. This helps preserve valuable skills and extends the use of items.

The first Repair Café was organized in 2009 in Amsterdam-West, at the initiative of Martine Postma. Today, the Repair Café International Foundation supports a worldwide network of more than 50,000 volunteers, who together attempt to repair approximately 720,000 products annually.

The RepairMonitor: data on what breaks and why

In addition to repairing items, Repair Café also collects data. In the RepairMonitor, an online tool, Repair Cafés register which products come in, what is wrong with them, and what has been done to repair them. The collected data provides insight into the sustainability and repairability of products. With these insights, the foundation approaches manufacturers, politicians, and consumers, aiming to design more repairable products that fit into the circular economy.

From use to insight: the RepairMonitor renewed

After more than eight years, it is time to redesign and rebuild the RepairMonitor. Together with the Repair Café International Foundation, Digital Natives is working to modernize the tool. By ensuring that the new RepairMonitor better aligns with the practice in Repair Cafés, we aim to increase user-friendliness and improve the quality of the data. In the coming months, we will work on:

• Researching the motivation, context, and experiences of visitors and volunteers within Repair Cafés 💭
• Developing user journeys that map out the different flows 🎢
• Testing with volunteers and visitors how the tool works in practice 🧪
• Exploring how AI and technology can smartly support 🤖
• Redesigning and rebuilding the registration forms 🔖

With this renewal, the RepairMonitor becomes more future-proof, and more data can be collected to make repairability insightful.