Pandemic, Repair, and Resilience: Coping with Technology Breakdown during COVID-19

Abstract

COVID-19 disrupted the existing ecosystem of technology repair and recycle in Bangladesh as visiting repair workshops became difficult and most repairers and e-waste workers had to temporarily close their businesses. Consequently, users were left with very few choices for fixing or recycling their devices. Based on our interviews with 30 repair and e-waste workers and 21 users of electronic devices we capture various aspects of this disruption and the corresponding coping mechanisms. This paper reports how the repair and e-waste worker communities adopted various changes to their work, provided remote services, and yet faced a decline in their business. On the other hand, end-users learned to fix their devices, collaborated with each other, and negotiated with partially broken devices to address this challenge. We further discuss the broader implications of our findings for HCI scholarship in HCI4D, resilience, and sustainability.