Nobody Has Anywhere to Fix Anything

This blog started as a question I kept coming back to as the research piled up for our recently released Futures Readiness Index: 

Let me start by showing you what I was seeing.

There is a company that will take a Steelcase Leap you were about to throw out, tear it all the way down, rebuild it, and warranty the work for twelve years. That is roughly the same warranty Steelcase puts on a new one. They have been doing this since 2002. Other outfits sell replacement parts for Herman Miller and Steelcase chairs, or 3D print them, and say right on the page that they are not affiliated with either company. Then they hand you a chart telling you how to find the tag under your seat, read the model number, and work out whether your Leap was built before or after the arms changed in 2009. They wrote the manual our industry never wrote. They stock the parts our industry stopped making.

Nobody asked them to do this. They did it because people wanted their chairs fixed and wanted to do it themselves. So the honest answer about repair is that it already arrived, it went around us, and it has been running for twenty years in warehouses none of us have visited. What is coming is not repair. It is something stranger.

The thing that stopped me in my research was the innovations around how things could be taken apart. 

New studies are creating adhesives that hold like any adhesive you have ever specified, and then release cleanly when you apply pressure. Think of it as your cabinet door you can press and open. Nothing gets destroyed. The panel comes off the frame, and the frame is still a frame. Pair that with the new material work, the plastics and composites you can reheat and reshape to work a dent out of, and think about what that actually does to a piece of furniture. That means our furniture truly becomes a kit-of-parts, and what we need to design is the inventory of parts, not just the final composition.

Glue is the thing that makes a chair a chair instead of a pile of parts. It is the moment the design becomes final. Take that away and permanence stops being a property of the object and becomes a setting. The thinking we be that we select an assortment of upholsteries, frames, laminates, and accessories that can move around when someone decides to switch them up, and that makes them easier to take apart and repair as well. Which means the expectation shift is not that clients will want furniture repaired. It is that they will want furniture changed, and they will not expect to buy anything to do it. And once that is true, a worn conference chair does not have to come back as a refurbished conference chair. It can come back as something else.

That is the part I do not think our industry has priced in. We keep talking about circularity as though the second life is a fainter copy of the first. Same chair, new cover, back in service. What is actually arriving is furniture that is never finished. The piece we specify can be rebuilt in hundreds of ways and refreshed by any user at any time.

And that is where it falls apart, because there is nowhere to do this, as evidenced by the fact that the places people go for repairs right now aren't universally recognized. There are thousands of repair cafés running out of church halls and library basements because we never built the room, and the room they actually need is bigger than the one they are borrowing.

So the real question to consider today is this: 
If we can design furniture that is never finished, where do we expect anyone to finish it?

Want more of what the Index is showing us? Read it here.