Dr. Smartphones: an ethnography of mobile phone repair shops

Drawing on a two-year field study in Geneva Lausanne and Zurich this book focuses on independent repair stores and hackerspaces of Switzerland, and the practices of their technicians. How do these individuals come to end up fixing cus- tomers’ devices? How do they learn to handle products that were not de- signed to be repaired? And what can the mending of a cracked phone display tell us about skill innovation and the use of technology?In this book Nicolas Nova and Anaïs Bloch argue that a greater understand- ing of maintenance and repair is both timely and urgent a fundamental part of any attempt to meet the challenges of an era of environmental crisis and consumer waste. An inquiry into “mobile repair cultures” presented through portraits of individual repairers this book highlights users’ efforts to improve the sustainability of their technical objects.

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