Professor: Young People Are "Lost Generation" Who Can No Longer Fix Gadgets

antdude points out this story about one of the problems with our ever increasingly disposable world. "Young people in Britain have become a lost generation who can no longer mend gadgets and appliances because they have grown up in a disposable world, the professor giving this year's Royal Institution Christmas lectures has warned. Danielle George, Professor of Radio Frequency Engineering, at the University of Manchester, claims that the under 40s expect everything to 'just work' and have no idea what to do when things go wrong. Unlike previous generations who would ‘make do and mend’ now young people will just chuck out their faulty appliances and buy new ones. But Prof George claims that many broken or outdated gadgets could be fixed or repurposed with only a brief knowledge of engineering and electronics. "

Comments

Dupe

[Anonymous Coward]

This story is a dupe from my grandfather's generation, who cried about the same thing.

Re:Dupe

[Rhywden]

That was a time when you could actually easily fix something. Take cars, for example. Fixing a modern car aside from trivial cases is not easy.
Hell, even exchanging a broken lightbulb can pose major problems.

Re:Dupe

[khasim]

And the reason is ... because the stuff used to be BUILT by people. If a guy on the assembly line had to be able to get his hands onto a bolt to install it then someone replacing it would also be able to reach it.

Once we switched to robots for manufacturing it became a lot more difficult. A robot can reach where a person cannot.

Which means you save a lot of "wasted" space and materials ... but you have to take apart X, Y and Z to be able to read the headlight.

Re:Dupe

[pushing-robot]

It all comes down to economic efficiency. Manufacturing costs have plummeted while labor costs have skyrocketed, so it's not a productive use of one's time to repair. Time is expensive, stuff is cheap.

Repair isn't the only skill that's suffered; we've forgotten how to farm, forgotten how to weave our own clothing, forgotten how to do many things that were required of a household a century or two ago. It's also why we get connected halfway around the world for customer service and don't get our fuel pumped and windshield washed by a whistling attendant.

Whether this is ultimately good or bad depends on your point of view, but unless we run short of raw materials, drive up costs via pollution taxes, or see an economic meltdown in the west it's not likely to change course. Rising wages in China and other industrial companies will only do so much before factories switch to robot labor.

Re:Dupe

[anagama]

I think there is an aspect to this that is being missed to some degree. Yes, it is true that repairing a device with surface mount components the size of dust by hand is a lost cause. It is true that manufacturers build their products in ways that makes opening them impossible or nearly so, and it is true that it is often cheaper to replace something than repair. None of that is going to change.

But off to the side, tons of people are making their own stuff with Arduino/Pi/etc.etc. People are learning about interfacing with the real world through sensors and adjusting it, or adjusting to it, with any number of methods. The barriers to these types of projects have dropped immensely recently and there are lots of people who take that broken toaster oven, and totally repurpose it as a soldering oven.

So, perhaps people _are_ less likely to try to fix things than they were decades ago -- instead, a great number are learning how to _design_ their own rather sophisticated stuff. Grandpa may have been able to repair his tractor, but his grandkid can automate it to minimize overlap when out tilling the fields saving diesel, time, topsoil, and mechanical wear/tear. The former skill is valuable, but the current skill is valuable in its own way.

Re:Dupe

[Nemyst]

Yep. That Professor needs to check back, it's not the "young people", it's their parents' generation. The ones who've decided that repairable appliances reduces income for companies, that cheap materials are the way to go, that throwaway electronics pave the future. I'll be the first to agree that many changes have been for the better: you wouldn't be able to get cars as efficient as they are now without a lot of complex machinery and ICs everywhere. Many of our most beloved gadgets can only exist because of miniaturization and automation of production, at the cost of being able to repair them. It's just that when your washing machine's motor fails after a year, or you need to replace your convection oven's fan seven times before it stops making a buzzing sound, you realize that it's about as much about cost-cutting as it is about efficiency and actual, material gains.

Re:Dupe

[lgw]

Nah, it's nothing new. Friend of mine when we were teens had a 70s compact car - a VW Scirocco, or maybe that replaced this one - where you had to pull the engine to change the oil filter. No joke. The guy on the assembly line could install the filter easily because the engine wasn't in the car yet. Ahh, 70s cars.

Cars keep getting better - whens the last time you fiddled with points (or, heck, even had a mechanical distributer). What's changed is now there's no room in the engine compartment - everything's in there as tight as can be, to put maximum space in the cabin. There's a procedure and a tool for everything, and often service is easy if you've had the specialty training, but it's no longer designed for the average driver to just eyeball it and figure it out, beyond the most routine stuff.

Re:Dupe

[FooAtWFU]

Oh really? Broken-window fallacy much? Think of what our economy could do if these people spent that laptop cash on something better...

Its a cost decision

[Anonymous Coward]

I have detailed technical knowledge. However my time is not worth fixing every small gadget that breaks. If I break a blender, its simply not worth me sourcing parts, waiting, and then spending an hour repairing it.

Re: Its a cost decision

[WarJolt]

It's not about cost. It's about design. They used to build things to last. They'll build products with improper snubbing. They know that the back emf will eventually burn out the IC and they depend on it. It lowers cost and means you buy a new electric carving knife every couple of years.

Integrated this, integrated that

[by (1706743)]

Part of the problem could be that so many things are integrated now.

Entry-level audio gear, for instance, tends to use integrated amplifiers -- no longer can you fix easily fix a blown power transistor, as you could with older gear. Same thing with cars -- adjusting the timing on a car was sort of a rite of passage for many, but it's hardly feasible on a new car with computer-controlled everything.

Yeah, sure

[russotto]

This is why there are no forums full of information of how to replace the screen on your phone or tablet. This is why ifixit.com doesn't exist. This is why you can't order OBD scanners for your car.

It's only a minority of people who are skilled and interested enough to fix things. But that's always been so. It's just that now it's typically cheaper to replace broken things (well, not cars) than call in someone who can fix them, because labor costs for repair are so high compared to initial manufacturing costs.