The Farnham Repair Café (FRC) offers a monthly ‘Place and Space’ for Farnham’s citizens to come and get products fixed and to “share in the repair”. To date a variety of products have been fixed at repair stations covering electrical/electronics, mechanical, bicycles and clothing/apparel. This has included specific repairs to vacuum cleaners, head phones, lights, hats, jackets, bags, baby strollers and bicycles. The launch of FRC builds on original research and a conference that The Centre for Sustainable Design ® organised on global Repair Café and Hackerspace movement.

FRC is not just about repairs, there is also scope for creativity. Broken consumer products can be brought to the “creative zone”. As part of the creative process, FRC encourage town residents and students to experiment and explore new ideas around up-cycling of products – re-assembling product parts for a new intended purpose or for an improved function.

FRC also offers a place to socialise and network, and fits well into Farnham’s identity as a crafts town. It offers a space to “re-craft” products and provides an opportunity to practice haptic (hand-to-head) skills and creatively complete technical fixes to broken gadgets, alongside experimenting with new ideas from waste.

Product owners visiting FRC either get their broken products repaired or are given advice on how to repair or recycle it. Volunteer repairers value the opportunity of sharing their knowledge and skills with local townspeople. Central to FRC is the “Share the Repair” philosophy that encourages all product owners to participate in the repair process and learn how to do repairs themselves. A successful repair should increase the useful lifetime of their product and therefore divert waste from landfill. If the repair is beyond the capability or capacity of the Repair Café, product owners will receive advice on how and where their product may be repaired or recycled. The aim is for the product owners to come away with a greater understanding of how their product works and why repairing is a better solution than recycling or binning it!

FRC also aims to cooperate with local repair businesses by acting as a supportive hub offering access to those local repair businesses and encouraging them to get involved directly as volunteers in the Repair Café to help promote their business. It is hoped that FRC will become a catalyst for a more efficient and robust repair ecosystem in the town by providing a useful intervention in the waste stream that presently does not exist.

Product owners bring their broken products to the FRC and then explain the problem to volunteer repairers. Then the product owners are directed to appropriate repair stations where diagnosis is undertaken, advice is given and repairs are completed where feasible. FRC operates every second Saturday of the month from 10.00am to 1pm. It is hoped that regular monthly activity establishes a familiar pattern for visitors perhaps linked to a Saturday morning shop or visit to the town.