NICOLAS NOVA
HEAD—GENÈVE (HES-SO)
SWITZERLAND
ANAÏS BLOCH
HEAD—GENÈVE (HES-SO)
SWITZERLAND
Focusing on the documents produced by Swiss smartphone repairers working in independent stores, this paper highlights the “knowledge trajectories” undertaken by the information these practitioners uncover by disassembling phones, annotate and sometimes share with peers, competitors or customers. Based on ethnographic vignettes, this visual essay shows and discusses the ways such stores can be seen as a counterpoint to academic or private research & development (R&D) laboratories—because of the situated knowledge they produce against manufacturers, and their goal that is not simply to understand how smartphones work and behave, but to help customers whose phones are broken or corrupted.
repair; maintenance; smartphone; repair-shop; knowledge; know-how; procedure
My store is a laboratory. (F., male, repairer, Geneva)
This is how one of the participants in our investigation of Swiss smartphone repair stores described his workplace to us (Nova and Bloch 2020). When we asked him to elaborate, he argued that a big chunk of his time was devoted to grasp how smartphones where designed, and how they work. He also explained that his store constantly buys new devices all the time in order to understand how they differ from earlier models:
As soon as a new model comes out, we have to update our knowledge. We bought an iPhone 7, our technicians broke it. It cost us 1000 CHF but it was an opportunity to learn. (F., male, repairer, Geneva)
This quote makes us aware of the relationship between the production of knowledge, described here as a learning process, and the metaphor of the laboratory, associated with the dismantling and reconstitution of the smartphone’s mode of operation—a prerequisite to the maintenance services of this object that customers bring to them. And this “requirement” consists in breaking other smartphones. This operation of intentional destruction of a technical object is important as it testifies to the fundamental asymmetry faced by anyone who wants to repair a mobile phone: device manufacturers rarely provide resources or support for repairs made by users or uncertified third parties. Most of them have enacted strategies to make maintenance operation difficult (e.g. by using non-standard security screws), and critical information about product designs or repair processes are generally kept private. Official tools or spare parts are also strictly limited to “certified” repairers. Facing such difficulty, repairers combine multiple DIY practices (individual and shared) to learn how to fix smartphones, such as tearing-down phones, reverse engineering, or discovery by trial and error. In addition, dismantling smartphones is of interest to us because of the frequency of this task among repairers, carried out in order to know these technical objects and to set up maintenance procedures, as we will show in this article. Disassembly activities also matter insofar as they are another way of producing knowledge and know-how described in the literature on DIY practices; for instance described as “Critical Making” by Matt Ratto in order to refer to knowledge generation operations emerging through material engagement with technology (Ratto 2011, 253).
This paper discusses how the maintenance and repair of smartphones requires more or less formalized knowledge and know-how, and how they materialize in the context of Swiss repair stores we investigated between 2016 and 2018. Adopting the format of a visual essay, we focus here on “gestures,” formed by the reverse engineering of the functioning of the devices, the setting up of intervention processes, and the sharing of the documentation produced in doing so.
This two-years ethnographic investigation of smartphone repair shops and hackerspaces in Geneva, Lausanne and Zurich is based on 42 interviews and in-situ observation sessions, completed by sixty visits to stores; the participation of one of us in a four-month internship in a store in Lausanne. We also conducted thirteen interviews and observation sessions in hackerspaces, as well as repeatedly participating in repair cafés held in these places. While hackerspaces and repair cafés were always organized by people between 25 and 60-years-old with Swiss Citizenship and a degree in higher education (engineering school, university), the store repairers were all young foreigners (France, Algeria, Tunisia, Syria, Russia, Thailand) in their twenties, with almost no formal training. In both cases, they were generally male, with few exceptions. This article compiles a series of photography, field drawings and notes we took on the field. The participants in our fieldwork were not comfortable with the idea of being photographed, particularly because of their sometimes illegal social status, as well as their discomfort with a documentation of their work. This is why we supplemented the photos with drawings and sketches, in addition to the field notes and interview excerpts.
From a theoretical standpoint, this research sits within the wider framework of maintenance & repair studies (Graham and Thrift 2007; Jackson 2014; Denis and Pontille 2017). More specifically, it addresses such issues about technical knowledge in relation to the various ethnographies on the maintenance of cell phones and other electronic objects in anthropology and STS (Jackson et al. 2012; Jackson et al. 2014; Ahmed et al. 2015; Bell et al. 2018; Houston 2019).
Figure 1. Illustration of an uncredited smartphone repair shop in Geneva (Switzerland). Owned by a woman from the French Caribbean, who is in charge of customer contact, this store also has a repair technician. The presence of women in this kind of place is rather limited, and usually in the positions of managers or owners of the premises. Repairers tend to be men, most of the time from foreign origins (French, French-Tunisian, French-Moroccan, Lebanese or Syrian) and who take care of most of the work (changing screens, batteries or buttons, data recovery, software adjustments). In this store, typical of those we surveyed, there are three part-time repairmen, who take turns working alongside the owner. Although the store front focuses on repairs, it is in fact a hybrid store, selling smartphone accessories (headsets, protective shells) as well as phones and tablets. All this to balance out their rather precarious business model. Clientele in Geneva is quite diverse, with a mix of locals and foreigners, all attracted by the low prices and the amount of time to fix devices. (Source Bloch).
As described by the repairer mentioned in the opening of this paper, as well as Lara Houston’s work on phone repair (2019), disassembling smartphones is a recurring task for technicians. This results in several forms of documentation, sometimes official, sometimes reconstructed, and can eventually be shared with colleagues, competitors or customers (see figures 2, 3, and 4).
Figure 2. Close-up photograph of an iPhone 5C motherboard made using a microscope by a technician. The image was printed and filed in a transparent plastic sleeve with other similar documents (such as the one shown in figure 4). While this screenshot is annotated with circles and arrows to designate specific parts, there is no title nor additional texts, since such picture is only meant to be used by its author. In this case, the motivation of this document was to remind him where to operate on the motherboard (e.g. finding potential test points to check voltage). (Source Bloch).