In today’s world, the buzz of innovation surrounds us incessantly. From scrolling through LinkedIn feeds filled with anecdotes of out-of-the-box thinking to witnessing the emergence of new programs and careers annually, it seems that everyone is caught up in the fervor of innovation in different areas. Most universities are releasing new on-trend courses related to innovation, even multiple crash courses for people to jump in and master the domain, all with the promise to create out-of-the-box, life-changing ideas. Not only universities, but different workplaces are demanding innovative approaches, ideas for businesses, the latest apps to automate their processes, or similar ideas. Board of Innovation, a global consulting firm, estimates that there are about 70,000 books on innovation available for purchase right now. There’s this sense of innovation being everywhere, and so it’s crucial to deconstruct the true nature of innovation from its superficial manifestations.
In their book “Innovation Delusion,” Lee Vinsel and Andrew Lee Russell affirm that innovation is the successful commercialization of a novel idea that adds tangible value in the market. True innovation involves the profitable combination of new or existing knowledge, resources, and technologies. However, they differentiate innovation from “innovation speak,” which they define as “a breathless dialect of word salad that trumpets the importance of innovation while turning the term into an overused buzzword.” (Vinsel and Lee, 2023). Disruptive, thinking outside the box, design thinking, paradigm shift, Silicon Valley mindset, hackathon, insight, ideation, innovation hub – some of the buzzwords surrounding this insatiable world that keeps on asking for more and more profitable ideas to the market. Consequently, by using innovation to refer to basically everything, the word is losing its meaning as it is becoming everything. And at the same time, it’s leading to a false premise that innovation is inherently good.
Natasha Jen’s TED Talk, “Design Thinking is Bullshit,” challenges the unquestioned embrace of innovation speak, manifesting a critical reflection on its underlying motives and consequences. As she states, this way of approaching problems is a watered-down way of relation with design and sometimes the solutions offered by the participants of the normal workshops are more opinions than real solutions. In this way, Natasha challenges normalizing this innovation speak and asks for designers to question their methods of creation to truly get to better solutions in the future.
So, in a world saturated with this necessity to innovate over anything else, we must pause to ask ourselves: Is innovation, as used lately, inherently beneficial? If not, then why is this sensational bomb that everyone is demanded to do? Or does the relentless pursuit of innovation serve primarily capitalist impulses, driving the perpetual creation of new products and processes without due consideration for their broader impact?
The capitalist drive to revolutionize production processes in the name of efficiency raises ethical concerns about the relentless pursuit of innovation. Are we creating for the sake of creation, under the false assumption that innovation will solve all problems? In the book “The Creative Act: A Way of Being” Rick Rubin establishes in an interesting way that the human impulse to create is innate and should be embraced by everyone. As he says, “everyone is a creator” (Rubin, 2023). Nevertheless, it is important to ponder the ethics of creation and our responsibility towards the objects and systems we create and consume.
Through these considerations, there arises a growing movement advocating for a shift in focus from innovation speak to the act of repair and maintenance. Lee Vinsel and Andrew Lee Russell argue that while repair and maintenance are essential for sustaining our world, they often go unnoticed and undervalued and the attention is focused on innovation speak – it’s a timeless activity. The world rewards innovators but neglects their maintainers. To understand this, they compare the positionality of the people who dedicate themselves to innovate in a company, while the ones who maintain, for example, the IT people, the cleaning staff or the repairman. Who has a better social status? Despite this, who are the ones who allow the system to function when there is a problem? The people who dedicate themselves to maintain, even if they are not fully appreciated, they are who really understand the art of things and who in a more understandable way have the power to change things. As Steven J. Jackson states in his text Rethinking Repair: “(Repair) fills in the moment of hope and fear in which bridges from old worlds to new worlds are built, and the continuity of order, value, and meaning gets woven, one tenuous thread at a time. And it does all this quietly, humbly, and all the time” (Jackson, 2014).
With this in mind, Lee Vinsel and Andrew Lee Russell created a group named the Maintainers focused on people who decide to focus their work into repair and maintenance, including everything: IT repair, mechanical repair, mental maintenance, physical care, etc., and they’ve been the past 8 years bringing consciousness into this important practice. They gather every month to talk about the new initiatives being implemented to impulse new community and personal repair projects. Not only them, but along the world, there’s a conscience behind bringing major interest into repairing. Groups like The Reset Project in the United Kingdom embody this shift, promoting knowledge-sharing and repair culture as alternatives to mass consumerism and, of course, ecological reasons.
In my research to find more information about this topic, I got the chance to be part of a monthly meeting. After participating in one of the Maintainers’ reunions, I had the opportunity to talk to Vita Wells, founder of The Repair Culture, a project focused on bringing repair into schools and educational non-profits, particularly interested in supporting the development of new educational programs and materials designed to be widely shared. In our conversation about her work, she emphasizes the ethos of care in repair, advocating for a paradigm shift towards preserving and nurturing our possessions rather than discarding them. As she understands it, repairing objects fosters a deeper understanding of their functionality and material characteristics, establishing a more meaningful relationship with our belongings, and changing our behavior with our surroundings. The moral relationship humans have with their objects, this ethos of care, is trying to reconstruct that forgotten care consequence of crude functionalism of technology filed. Relationality to the technological artifacts and systems that surround us, positioning the world of things as an active competent in the ongoing project of building more humane and sustainable collectives.
We had the chance to talk about how surprisingly enough, contrary to popular belief, repair and innovation are not mutually exclusive; they are intricately connected. Through repair, we gain new insights into our technologies and develop a sense of appreciation and responsibility towards them. As Steven J. Jackson describes: the efficacy of innovation in the world is limited – until extended, sustained, and completed in repair. The growing repair movement underscores the importance of ethical considerations in design, prompting designers to anticipate and facilitate future repairability.
Taking everything into account, I believe there is an interesting point of view worthy of research. The essence of innovation extends beyond the superficial cover of buzzwords and hype. It encompasses a deeper understanding of value creation, ethical responsibility, and the symbiotic relationship between creation and maintenance. By embracing repair culture and fostering an ethos of care, we can forge a more sustainable and ethical approach to innovation, one that prioritizes longevity, resilience, and human well-being over fleeting trends and superficial advancements. But how can we measure the impact things have in our life? How could we effectively implement an ethos of care and how do we revolutionize the way we understand innovation into a more holistic understanding of situations?
