Christopher Tidy was 10 years old the first time he took apart an engine.

The carburetor—the block of machinery that supplies a gas engine with fuel and air and helps to spark ignition—was a mess. It was blocked with thick layers of congealed fuel and dust. Tidy saw the problem and just happened to have some tools nearby and a burning curiosesity about how exactly this thing worked and what he could do to fix it. That quickly turned into an attempt “to assemble a kind of Frankenstein engine” out of the parts of many discarded petrol engines. He disassembled the rumbling machine piece by piece until he found the offending parts, then doused the carburetor in gasoline, followed by water and dish soap, then scrubbed it clean with a toothbrush. The carburetor sat shiny and clean on his shelf until he sold it to someone looking for the right part.

Since then, Tidy has continued to feel inclined to disassemble things with his hands, see how they work, and, hopefully, make them work better. Quickly, he realized that it is not always quite so easy to just gleefully take something apart.

Product repairability is an issue that is building to a boil. Advocacy groups like iFixit and PIRG have campaigned on making products more repairable in the US, Canada, and across the world. The European Union has advanced legislation in recent years that compels companies to let users repair their own devices. These efforts have led to companies like Apple and Samsung implementing repair programs that make it easier for customers to fix their own phoness, tablets, and other small electronics. Still, humans generate an astronomical amount of waste every day, mostly because we tend to throw broken things away rather than figure out how to reuse or repair them.

Tidy wants to help that process, and to come at it from the source: by focusing on product design, and trying to provide a framework for how that can be steered in a more repairable direction.

Since tearing apart that first engine, Tidy has focused on fixing stuff throughout a career in engineering and academia. (Aside from a brief jaunt in the late 1990s where he helped design a robot bent on destruction for the show Robot Wars.) He studied mechanical engineering at Cambridge University, and went on to teach engineering and work on projects at schools in Germany, Russia, and at the Field and Space Robotics Laboratory at MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Now 42, Tidy runs a volunteer repair workshop in Ladybrand, South Africa. It is not a business, just a space that he uses to tinker or help others repair their lamps, trucks, and toasters.

After years in that workshop, Tidy has put together some big ideas about how to build more repairable products.

Think Different

Tidy hopes to inspire product designers to focus on making long-lasting products from jump. It is an endeavor that he understands after a career of designing products and seeing how wasteful the process is. The trouble is that a product designer has to bring a product to market at a certain price and under a certain development budget, and what they have to prioritize doesn’t always translate to a long-lasting final product. Mechanical engineers developing a product can feel like they’re being pulled in many different directions, Tidy says, focusing primarily on consumer preferences, speed of manufacturing, and keeping costs low. Designing with repair in mind often gets forgotten. Tidy wanted to do something to fix that.

“While there are all these organizations available to support the individual repairer who wants to do it on their kitchen table, there's nothing much to support the product designer,” Tidy says. “I started to think, well, how can you do this? How can you actually make this into a strategy to help product designers to come up with something easily repairable?”

That chin scratching has resolved into a framework that Tidy calls Robust. Like any decent labeling system, this one comes in the form of a neat and, well, Tidy acronym. Each letter stands for an ideal in the design process that Tidy believes would lead to making products more Rugged, Open, Balanced, Useful, Satisfying, and Transformative. But yeah, the word Robust rolls off the tongue much more easily.

It’s worth breaking down the philosophy. Rugged means what it sounds like—taking the effort to make sure the pieces of a product are less likely to fail. Open, in theory, calls for devices to me more readily accessible if repairs are needed. This could mean making a coffee pot easier to disassemble, or it could take the shape of Apple’s decision to use a different kind of adhesive that makes it easier to swap out batteries in the iphoness 16. Balanced means applying equal time and attention to the components of a product, as well as testing for weak points.

“The problem is not so much the analysis, which these companies generally do well, but actually not knowing exactly how people are going to abuse stuff,” Tidy says. “You always want to invite people into your design and prototyping process to say, yeah, try and break this. Can you break it? Does it seem like a good product? And, you know, learn from that and then make some changes.”

The last three terms—Useful, Satisfying, and Transformative—refer to the inherent value a user sees in the product. Something that’s cheap and poorly made can get the job done, but it’s unlikely to inspire any passion for the product or make you want to keep it around. Tidy hopes that people repairing products will make them more attached to them.

Human Resources

Tidy’s system was inspired by thinkers like Raymond Loewy, the French industrial designer whose prominence in the early 20th century led to him being called the “father of industrial design,” and inventors like Harry Ferguson, who is credited with developing the modern farming tractor. He also cites books like Dieter Rams’ Ten Principles for Good Design for the desire to build a system that helps explain what makes for a good repairable device.

But more than anything, Tidy’s system was developed out of lived experience. In South Africa, resources are often more limited than in places like the US. Tidy tells a story about a neighbor who had a broken ax, but who lived 250 kilometers from a hardware store. Instead of buying a new one, he was forced to improvise, and did so by shearing off a piece of metal from his truck, welding it to the ax head, and sharpening it down.

“This is something where I think the more money you have and the richer the lifestyle you have, the less pressure there is to do those things,” Tidy says. “So you often see the most ingenuity in the places where there's the least wealth.”

That gets harder to do if the products aren’t designed to be long lasting; much of the stuff sold in the US and across the world feels disposable. Another primary component of the right-to-repair argument writ large is pushing against planned obsolescence. Products that get made cheaply, with the intention that they’ll only last a few years until you need to replace them, are the opposite of what repair enthusiasts like Tidy support.

He is also skeptical of the idea of a product that needs constant updates. There’s a sort of anxiety that comes with a product that promises a finite amount of free updates. Tidy says he just turns them all off.

“So far, nothing terrible has happened to me,” Tidy says. “It's not like my computer blew up or my coffee machine strangulated me or something like that.”

That might not be the case for something like a computer or phones that needs security updates, but Tidy worries about creeping featurism that might cause designers to focus on new, less fundamental features at the expense of the bits that make the product more robust. He cites something like the much maligned Juicero or LG’s transparent refrigerator as products that focus on unnecessary features more than what actually helps it function.

Tidy believes in the power of repairing something yourself as a sort of cycle of design, repair, and love. If you fix something, you might feel an extra bit of attachment to it because you’ve put that effort in. And making it easier to make those repairs in the first place could make you more inclined to keep things around.

“People find it very satisfying to take something that's broken and basically it has no value and then learn how it works,” Tidy says. “Maybe fit some fairly cheap spare parts to it, and then restore the value of the product both in terms of its utility and the money they invested in it."