Making Citizens, Reassembling Devices: On Gender and the Development of Contemporary Public Sites of Repair in Northern California

Abstract

For the dozens of visitors to the 2012 East Bay Mini Maker Faire, many remarkable experiences were ripe for the taking. They could share in handson activities while attending a working group on outdoor mosaics, observing a robotmaking demonstration, or sitting in on a makeyourown terrarium class. The activity in Studio One was no different: the energy was high and the action perplexing. Children clamored for a chance to use a Phillipshead screwdriver. Adults cut delicate wires and relayed stories of their latest electronic gadgets. A collection of mechanical odds and ends — soldering irons, spray cans, vacuum cleaner heads, and toaster shells — lay distributed across all surfaces of the room. This cluster of activity at the end of the Studio One hallway was as anarchic as all the rest: fast paced, thrilling, and difficult to digest (tdarci 2012). To the handful of people facilitating this work, the pandemonium was familiar and somewhat doubleedged. It was the thirtyfifth Fixit Clinic, a public venue for facilitated repair often arranged out of libraries, museums, and community centers located east of San Francisco (see fig. 1). Meanwhile, fifty miles south, the inaugural event of the Palo Alto Repair Cafe, another public site of repair, was taking place at the Museum of American Heritage (see fig. 2). The two events were not planned to overlap, but, as we will see, this arrangement of concurrent yet separate programs prefigured their common practices and divergent cultural aims. Public sites of repair, such as the Fixit Clinic and the Repair Cafe, are communitysupported events designed to help local residents fix and learn to fix