Right to Repair Cards

Outputs from this project

Lachlan D Urquhart, Susan Lechelt, Christopher Boniface, Haili Wu, Anna Marie Rezk, Nidhi Dubey, Melissa Terras, and Ewa Luger. 2024. The Right to Repair (R2R) Cards: Aligning Law and Design For A More Sustainable Consumer Internet of Things. In Proceedings of the 13th Nordic Conference on Human-Computer Interaction (NordiCHI ’24). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Article 8, 1–20. https://doi.org/10.1145/3679318.3685341

Part of the Fixing the Future project, we created The Right to Repair (R2R) Cards, a novel design tool to support development of more sustainable consumer Internet of Things (IoT) devices. Current IoT systems are not built to last, with planned obsolescence and multiple routes to redundancy due to combined failures in hardware, software, and data management. This ultimately contributes to growing global eWaste. Our R2R cards consolidate analysis of 25 pieces of UK / EU legislation and standards, establishing 90 legal requirements around repair, cybersecurity, environmental design, consumer, and data rights. The cards were tested in workshops with 37 participants, evaluating the utility of cards for critical reflection on legal obligations, and supporting transition to more sustainable IoT design.

Collaborators: Nidhi Dubey, Christopher Boniface

Funder: EPSRC

Project dates: 2024 – 2025