It has been a busy year for the Fixing the Future project – so much so we have created an Annual Report to document all the exciting things we have been up to. It is now available on below, and the Director’s statement provides a flavour of some of the highlights thus far.
“Welcome to our first annual Report for the Engineering and Physical Sciences research Council funded ‘Fixing the Future’ project. We are looking at the complex challenges of how to transcend towards more sustainable Internet of Things devices (e.g. smart watches, phones, speakers). It has been an exciting first year for us since we started officially on 1st October 2022. This annual report captures a snapshot of the range of research activities our team has been up to from Oct 2022 -late 2023, across the Universities of Edinburgh, Nottingham, Napier, and Lancaster.
We are beginning to see a range of academic outputs coming out of our research, across computing, law, and design venues. This includes papers in Computer Law and Security Review, Ubicomp, Design Research Society, NORDICHI, CHI, PLATE. There are many more interdisciplinary papers in the pipeline too.
We have been talking about our research to many different communities including the British and Irish Law and Technology Association, Sustainable AI conference, Scottish Law and Innovation Network, and the International Association of Societies of Design Research Congress, to name a few. The team has been engaging with repair café communities and local events around the country too such as at The Restart Project’s FixFest 2023.
There has been extensive public engagement too, from running repair experiences at festivals such as at ESRC Festival of Science 2023, The National Festival of Making, BlueDot Festival or talking about legal aspects of the right to repair for IoT at library spaces in Scotland.
As a team, we have held a launch event in September 2022, with quarterly all hands meetings at Lancaster, Nottingham, Edinburgh since. Our team has been growing too, with 15 early career intern research assistants and postdoctoral researchers joining us in our programme of work.
We are also generating a range of exciting new tools to help translate our research beyond academic audiences. For example, we have a new Right to Repair board game to playfully learn about the challenges of the circular economy and repair for IoT; the novel Repair Shop 2049 pop-up repair experiences for citizens to try their hand at soldering smart badges and fixing broken IoT devices; and a deck of Right to Repair cards to help manufacturers learn about the range of laws targeting building of more sustainable internet of things.
There is much more planned from the Fixing the Future project team in the coming year. This includes Edu-Kits for repair, more public engagement workshops including with our exciting pop-up touring caravan, policy briefings to shape governance in this area, and more academic papers.
Dr Lachlan Urquhart, Principal Investigator.”
