Repairing Behaviours - Object biographies and agencies informing waste reduction amongst consumers through repair services and practices.

This ESRC Policy Fellowship proposal is in response to DEFRA's call to address consumer behaviour within systems of production, addressing waste streams.

Specifically, this proposal outlines that repairing behaviours, involving a nuanced approach to understanding both repair-as-service and repair-as-practice, may facilitate waste reduction behaviours, but support is required to address how these repair behaviours can be better facilitated through the first principle of Right to Repair - namely, that objects should be designed in order to facilitate repair behaviour. Two perspectives to repair are evident. Repair-as-service involves manufacturers, producers, suppliers and technicians who engage in specialist repair services, which require consumers to participate in through new approaches to goods circulation, particularly involving re-use and redeployment. Repair-as-practice involves the local community, stakeholder organisations and individuals engaged in generalist repair themselves. Both circumstances involve decision-making on the part of the consumer or end-user to determine what type of repair behaviour is required, what skill/tools are involved, what information /knowledge is necessary, and an understanding of health and safety concerns associated with engaging repair.

To do this, the fellowship adopts a research methodology that implicates that objects involved in product and service systems possess agency; that is, they inform people and communities, through their composition and constitution, how repairs can, and cannot be done. By following objects, and building 'object biographies' based on interactions between objects and the repair community, anecdotal experiences of repair, from an object-oriented perspective, can generate insights into novel ways that objects could, can and should be designed to make repair behaviours, and by extension, waste management practices, more straightforward and addressing our transition towards a more circular economy (CE). Object biographies will be constructed through narratives and stories of experiences, as these objects are followed through a selection of repair processes involving various actors and agents. These stories involve data collection activities compiling text, audio and imagery through field work engagement in partnership with repair communities across the UK during the placement phase of the fellowship. Object biographies will help to inform and elucidate the agency that these followed objects have in allowing, or preventing, repair from taking place as they interact with the repair community, leading to novel insights that can inform the general public, creative and productive industries, higher education institutions teaching and training designers, through a nuanced approach to defining repair and leading to improved policy development.