This site is an archive of blog posts originally related to the Teardown Workshop Series (Spring 2019) originally posted to the ITP Sustainability blog.
Zines
{almost} Free Radio Stations
Electronics Vivisection
Sort Party
Cables
Take It Apart
Series Announcement Post
As a culmination of this project we made a series of zines based on what we learned.
Print it yourself. *Print instructions: use standard 8.5×11 copy paper and print at 100% scale.
View on the web.View and/or Print *Print instructions: Use A4 paper and print at 100% scale or for regular 8.5×11 copy paper, select “fit to page” in your print settings.
View and/or Print *Print instructions: Use A4 paper and print at 100% scale or for regular 8.5×11 copy paper, select “fit to page” in your print settings.
If you’re interested in more, here’s a list of references we’ve compiled.
Surplus and broken electronics are made ubiquitous by a complex network of extractive, economic, and material systems that continue to have deadly ecological impacts. Both technical and social access to these systems is still well guarded by power structures with vested interest in the who and how of repair and true ownership of our devices. Unpacking this complexity with our own hands, this workshop will introduce basic electronics skills by de-obsolescing an FM radio transmitter. Participants will leave this not only their own upcycled radio station, but the skills needed to lead this workshop on their own.
Ed Bear is an American performing artist and engineer. His work with robotics, sound, video, transmission and collective improvisation investigates the questionable calibration of social relationships with material technology. As an educator and designer committed to an equitable, open source world, he researches and practices material reuse as a civic responsibility. He has toured extensively in North America and Europe as a musician and teacher. He is currently working with littleBits, Inc. to revolutionize modular electronics.
We were so excited to host Ed Bear’s {almost} Free Radio Stations workshop. Thank you to Ed & everyone who turned out!
Ed started by presenting the material basis that make our electronics possible: silicon wafers. This highly processed material represents the pinnacle of semiconductor fabrication and is “guaranteed to be one of the lowest entropy things” on the planet.
He challenged the conventional refrain that 20th century technological advancement came from world war 2 spending, instead positing that the spread and development of new technologies was a result of the huge investments in education that came from The New Deal. This massive pool of human potential allowed for the advancements of design and technology that resulted. Dismantling and reuse are not just recycling of waste material but also recycling of cognitive capital. Waste has “negative value,” we actually incur a cost to rid ourselves of it. Recycling recovers the value of materials, and also lessons from the teams of engineers and designers that developed the product.
We took apart the iTrip, an example of a “rush-to-market” design. The iTrip was a a device produced when the first iPod was released and a manufacturer saw an opportunity to play music from iPods in cars. They produced far too many. Now, you can buy hundreds of them for 10 cents each.
As the first step, we split the clamshell case. Ed echoed what we’ve discussed all semester: that in this process we establish an emotional-technical relationship with the people that put this thing together with their hands.
“We recycle cognitive capital when we learn from design — there’s not a lot of that in media technology.”
There was a wire we needed to dislodge, that wrapped around the interior of the device. This is the device’s antenna. Here we had a chance to discuss how everything is an antenna, and everything has a resonant frequency.
When we’re moving around, we’re “changing our relationship to the electromagnetic spectrum that connects us all to the cosmos.”
So, this thing could only draw power from a first generation iPod nano, which none of us still have. Because Ed studied electrical engineering and has been taking things apart for a long time, he has the requisite knowledge to reverse engineer and develop around problems like this. It took him quite a bit of time to develop everything else we did in the workshop:
We had to learn to surface mount solder a chip to a small supplementary circuit boards Ed designed, which provided us an opportunity to discuss the challenges posed by the miniaturization of technology. “It is not the inevitable march of progress” to continually redesign things to be smaller, faster, stronger, and lighter, and it “has nothing to do with [making things] more accessible, compatible, or any other metric.” Learning to surface mount solder is “staying with the trouble.” We found the small landing pattern on the circuitboard, and used a lot of flux, which Ed explained allows the solder to stick to itself.
Note: buy doubles of surface mount parts, because they are tiny and get lost.
The integrated development environment to reprogram the computer chip on the board is prohibitively expensive ($5,000) so Ed’s response was to write all new firmware. I think this is the sort of thing that requires a significant investment in electrical engineering education. But, overwriting firmware is more accessible now thanks to Arduino. Once we had uploaded the firmware to our boards, we could transmit FM! The power of one of these small devices is very low, so this isn’t the kind of thing that would interfere with FM radio. They allow transmission in the 700MHz – 1200MHz range.
The obsolescence of these rush-to-manufacture products that resulted in a massive surplus offers us lessons about economics under capitalism, but also what ed called “the persistence of materiality.” These things humans are making will likely outlast us.
Cyd Cipolla, associate faculty at Gallatin, will present some of her work at the intersection of critical theory, the ethics of technology, and dismantlement. This workshop focuses on the theme of vivisection. Participants will vivisect self-contained electronic devices that would otherwise be thrown away and extract the internal electrical systems, while considering the various meanings of de-constructing on living systems.
Cyd is a scholar of women’s, gender, and sexuality studies whose teaching and research focus on science and technology studies, queer and feminist theory, and the various meanings of “critical making” (and un-making). In 2017 she co-edited the book Queer Feminist Science Studies, and her writing has appeared in various journals, including a forthcoming work on feminist science pedagogy in Women’s Studies – an interdisciplinary journal.
We were excited to be joined by Cyd Cipolla, whose Dismantle/Repurpose weekend workshop served as one of the inspirations for Teardown. Her teaching and research focus on science and technology studies, queer and feminist theory, and the various meanings of “critical making” (and un-making). Her guidance was instrumental in making the Teardown series happen. We are happy Cyd agreed to lead a thought-provoking session that drew out the connection between vivisection and electronic devices.
We learned vivisection was a term coined by activists in the early 20th century to differentiate dissection of living animals, with or without anaesthesia, from the dissection of dead animals. One culminating moment Cyd discussed was the Brown Dog affair, which involved a several-years long struggle between anti-vivisection activists and scientists in England. While England did have some laws against animal cruelty, the predominating perception and scientific argument at the time was that animals could not feel pain.
[Note] While not directly related to the workshop, it is important to note that the same language and “scientific reasoning” that has been used to justify cruelty and unethical experimentation on animals has also been used throughout history and war on ethnic minorities and women, including black and indigenous populations in the United States. The western scientific establishment is built on the worldview of white, wealthy, able-bodied, straight men and the undercurrent of scientific racism persists today. Cynthia Malone recently gave an excellent talk sponsored by NYU’s Office of Sustainability that focuses on decolonizing the scientific establishment in NYC, scientific racism in conservation sciences, and the trajectory that has led us to environmental collapse.
[Brown dog affair continued] Swedish activists infiltrated a lecture where a brown terrier dog was vivisected by William Bayliss, a professor that built his career studying the pancreas and nervous system by experimenting on dogs. While the activists claimed the vivisection was illegal and that the dog was not properly anaesthetized, Bayliss sued for libel and won. The anti-vivisectionists commissioned a statue, medical students rioted, it was whole thing. Today it is widely accepted that animals feel pain, though speciesism greatly affects the way the public reacts to the treatment of different animals. The anti-vivisection movement has grown into the animal rights movement.
One of the first things we learn at ITP is to unplug or remove battery power from our electronic circuits before working on them. But in the world, there are instances where people do have to interact, maintain, or repair live electric systems. One example of this is the servicing of high voltage cables. In order to do this work safely, workers wear a flame retardant steel mesh suit that allows them to raise themselves to the voltage of the system they’re working on. The electricity flows through their suit and they are able to work on the cables safely. This work is sometimes done hanging off the edge of a helicopter, which means the helicopter also needs to be isolated from ground and become part of the electrical system.
There are other cases where rather than protecting people from electronics, electronics need to be protected from people. Some small, sensitive electronics need to be protected from static electricity, and tools like anti-static wristbands allow people to work on them by making sure people are grounded. It’s easy to forget that we are electrical systems, too. Our cells conduct electricity, and we need electricity for our nervous system to work, to send signals to our body and brain.
“We are little electronics.”
Cyd realized her child would sometimes receive disposable electronic toys—entirely enclosed, there was no way to take the battery out, to replace it or otherwise repair the toy. Cyd provided these small, squishy cupcakes that sang happy birthday and had a blinking LED light. We all worked on taking them apart while we reflected on the information we’d been primed with. Our goal was to extract the electrical system whole.
It felt a bit different to approach dismantling with this new orientation to our relationship with electronic systems, and the history of cruelty toward living things.
It was interesting to note everyone approached this by undoing a readily-visible seam.
The impulse was definitely to take the battery out.
We were encouraged to make modifications to the cupcake. One participant performed liposuction (sewed her cupcake back together with less stuffing).
Two participants took the approach of examining the interior of the electronic enclosure to figure out how it works.
We also spent the time discussing related ideas and sharing references, like Ghost stories for Darwin.
It’s interesting to think about the work that went into developing this squishy button mechanism for a device that is meant to be disposed of—there was still something to learn from the engineering here.
Thanks, Cyd!
This workshop was an exercise in applying the frameworks we’ve considered while interrogating our relationship with the material world, and more specific to the Free Store, how we should recommend setting it up and sorting components when ITP moves to the new space in Brooklyn.
We have been loosely drawing on materials philosophy and science and technology studies (thinkers like Bruno Latour, Donna Haraway, and Jane Bennett). Bennett’s Vibrant Matter: A political ecology of things follows the roots of Western’s philosophy’s engagement with non-human materials, and argues for the acknowledgement of the agency and vitality of all things, a counterpoint to contemporary anthropocentricism.
Matt Ratto coined the term Critical Making in 2008/2009 to describe the hands-on activities that link digital technologies to society–a sort of combination of making and critical thinking, which is our primary interest. Open Design Now and Current also have good summaries and thoughts on how this practice relates to open design, critical design, and pedagogy. Ratto is now at the University of Toronto which has established the Critical Making Lab. The MCC Media Lab at NYU Steinhardt also incorporates critical making in its curriculum.
Last semester Marina Zurkow introduced us to Broken World Thinking and encouraged us to apply this framework, which asks, “what happens when we take erosion, breakdown, and decay, rather than novelty, growth, and progress, as our starting points in thinking through the nature, use, and effects of information technology and new media.”
Our study also makes us ask questions about the the politics of repair: the knowledge needed to fix things is privileged, and we inhabit systems for creating knowledge and physical objects that reflect dominant values. Jasmine had the opportunity to see Ellen Foster’s Reconstructing Technoscience talk at Gallatin’s STEAM series, where she presented her field work and research around feminist, queer, and anti-colonial practices at hackerspaces and labs. It was particularly interesting to hear how these values are mechanized. Max Liboiron’s Civic Laboratory for Environmental Action Research (CLEAR) blog includes a post “How to Run a Feminist Science Lab Meeting” and “The Power Relations of Citizen Science” but some takeaways were: establish shared values, establish safe(r) spaces where the realities of discomfort are acknowledged, and value diverse ways of knowing and expertise.
It’s also interesting to consider Freegan philosophy in our context.
For this sorting workshop, we drew on Luming’s experience at Shannon Mattern’s two-day workshop, Sorting Things Out, at the School for Poetic Computation. Mattern’s work addresses infrastructure, maintenance, care, border security, and the history of technology, systems at the core of the electronics we are interrogating. He presented on the workshop itself, how her organizational ontologies applies to his work as the Free Store Steward, and some starting points for thinking through the practice of sorting:
We each gathered some components that interested us from the free store and spent a few minutes classifying these disparate items into groupings that might make sense (“Baroque influences” “Joiners”). This gave us fodder for a discussion, and a lot of great suggestions.
What if we had enough space in the shop to have separate areas for (1) storage of material (2) free things? It was noted that there are consistently items found that follow the shop naming rules, but are from over 2 years ago. These items should be periodically re-classified as “free” to use. Right now, this distinction is muddled because of the proximity between the storage and free areas.
What if you could tap the person who put the item in the free store? Someone brought up the example of old breakout boards, where there might not be documentation online.
What if there were a system (post its?) that allowed people to indicate why they were getting rid of the item? Is it broken?
Should we keep a variable power supply next to the free store for easy components testing? And what kind oforientation would we need to provide around this?
It is worth breaking otherwise functioning junk? Amitabh had found a fully functioning hair straightener, but removing the heating element for his purposes would “severely downgrade” an item that might be used intact by someone else.
We can imagine an easier choice if you had a sense of how long the item had been there, or if it would otherwise get thrown away: what if we sorted the free store by time (as some other shops/labs do).
We could have areas for “new” items and areas for “old” items (2+ weeks was suggested) that are soon to be disposed of.
It would also be helpful to have scheduled times for shop “purges.”
Perhaps it would be helpful to have collapsible, subway-compatible carts so students could more easily store things at home. We brought this idea up with Tom who suggested we price out what this might look like, and we could try it out.
We also discussed how what the community puts on the free store goes on to influence what people create. It’s interesting to see which items are discovered and repeatedly used. This is one way that we as a learning community end up learning about what works and doesn’t work for the types of projects we make. People also have different thresholds for what they consider disposable and usable. For example, we were in disagreement about the usability of “dirty electronics” with some of us arguing it suggests disrepair, while others argued it’s easy to just clean them and reuse. It was universally agreed you’d have to be quite desperate to try to organize and reuse resistors — although I have witnessed their re-organization in smaller shops.
There was also interest in visiting the fixer’s collective. Maybe we can make this happen by the end of the semester?
During this workshop, we focused on a ubiquitous component, both in the maker’s box of materials and our modern life: Cables.
Cables (two or more wires wrapped in a jacket) are so prevalent in our surroundings and in our waste streams that it just makes sense to explore the ease of their reuse. The environmental impact and the cost (free in the shop cable pile!!) give us every reason to avoid buying brand new cables for every new project.
Jasmine started this session with a brief introduction to the material inside cables. A wire is just a conductive metal inside of an insulator. With exceptions (for example, silicon or enamel wire) most cables are predominantly copper (sometimes aluminum) and PVC (Polyvinyl Chloride, a type of plastic). Depending on the cable, there could be shielding or other material inside the cable. Of course, copper and PVC are prevalent in a lot of electronics products, connecting us to all the people and places that brought these objects into our lives.
Copper was Aphrodite’s sacred metal because of her association with Cyprus, which was mined for its copper. It has been used for over 5,000 years and there are many different alloys. Today it is one of the many minerals mined using open pit mining and hydrometallurgy methods. Hydrometallurgy is a recent innovation where ore is mixed with various solutions to separate minerals. It is water and energy intensive, resulting in runoff, or tailings, that are often toxic to the surrounding environment. It is sometimes still mined underground, and some pyrometallurgy is still also used (heating ore to separate minerals).
Aluminum, while less common, is also a more recently used metal in human history, extracted through open pit mining and completely reliant on hydrometallurgy. Aluminum’s ore is bauxite (1/4th of bauxite by weight is aluminum) and the resulting “red mud” or “red sludge” is toxic and presents a very serious disposal problem. Some methods have been developed to recover some of the minerals, use it in cement production, for example, or other secondary uses.
PVC is the third most widely used plastic polymer globally. About half of all PVC produced is used in plumbing and most of the rest is used for electrical cabling insulation. It is high density and hard, available in rigid and flexible varieties. It is relatively old for a plastic, originally developed in the late 1800s. Hydrogen chloride gas is released when it’s burnt, which is dangerous. It starts to degrade at just 158 degrees farenheit, which means it has to be heat treated.
Copper and Aluminum, like many other metals used in electronics (like gold!) are 100% recyclable and require far less energy to recycle than to mine (just 5% of the energy used to mine copper is used for its recycling, 10% for aluminum).
It was interesting to find that there are videos online that show how cables are manufactured and how machines have been created to aid in their recycling.
Jasmine’s favorite hydrometallurgy explainer comes from AvE.
Dominic Barret (ITP ’18, ITP Resident ’19) guided us through his approaches to innovating with cables. He walked us through various connectors and examples that demonstrated, with the proper connector, any cable in reasonable shape can become useful.
Besides all of the environmental reasons we can glean from where cables come from, Dominic named many good reasons to re-use cables. At ITP, we are used to using jumper wires for everything, and have gotten used to just coiling several together. Why do we do this when cables already exist:
Some caveats:
Dominic walked us through all the different kinds of connectors. Audio plugs and jacks are meant togetsignals, power, and ground connections across devices, but there is no rule that says they can’t just connect power and ground. The same is true with telephone line connectors–better known these days as the little square at the end of an ethernet cable. The wires inside all of these cables are just… wires! You can usually figure out how many wires are inside a cable (1) if you already know what kind of cable it is (2) by looking at the kind of connector it has.
Without a connector, an open cable with stripped wires can be connected just like any other wire. One easy prototyping solution are screw terminals, which also allow you to create a temporary connection and avoid soldering. Dominic showed us there are a number of adaptors, boards, and shields that can also be used. Beware: apparently not all screw terminals are spaced to be placed in breadboards, so double check!
The shop has: RCA jacks in yellow bins, MIDI Jacks, Serial Jacks, & lots & lots of used cables!
Once we learnt all this, we took a dive into the magic sphere of cables that Dominic recovered from the shop and used wire cutters, utility knives, and wire strippers to get to those wires. We recovered some cables and connected new terminals to them, but mostly just stripped cables to uncover the wires that they hold within.
It was super interesting to hear how Dom had used these cables to rethink the way he builds his circuits. We reflected on projects where we could have simplified our wiring by using one of these cables instead. We realize also this is not an exhaustive ways to reuse cables — we didn’t even touch on many kinds of cables! But it was certainly thought-provoking to consider.
The idea of a stripping club was also suggested. We could get together to strip cable, test its quality, and leave it out for the community to use.
Dom left us with a few links for an overview of terminology and the Sparkfun Guide Connectors. Thanks Dom!
This first workshop was an introduction to the Teardown series and to taking things apart.
Aaron Parsekian (ITP ’17, ITP-Resident ’18) has been taking things apart for a long, long time. This hobby of his has led him to develop a lot of knowledge around what kinds of components are inside the electronics we use (and throw away) as well as great insights into how things are made. Some things he said he likes to study are, what kind of value-engineering has been done, how are specific motions achieved, and what kinds of plastics are used, where and why?
He noted that still today, to some degree “Everything is assembled by a human hand, therefore, a human hand can take it apart.” And it’s true, as he said, that when we imagine that there are automated robots putting our electronics together we also sort of feel that we have no business in disassembling them, whether that’s for repair or to recover useful parts.
He started off with a presentation in which he explained:
“PH 2 is the key to the universe”
Transducers are some of the main components Aaron likes looking for: buttons, switches, motors, gears, springs, mirrors, bulbs, speakers, relays, lenses, variable resistors. Anything that takes energy in some form and translates it into light or movement is worth recovering and very easy to find. Other things that are very useful to look for:
For the workshop we bought some tools, but also found some other things to be useful:
For testing components:
We did not get into desoldering to recover components, but maybe this is something we should revisit.
Aaron first disassembled a power drill, which we learned has a standard “clamshell” case. In manufacturing, this means that the two sides are molded and then stuck together after the components are fit inside. Besides removing screws, it’s useful to have a jimmy tool to pry it open.
Not everything in a device is made in the same place! This particular drill had its battery made in Japan and the body made in Mexico. In addition to all the materials, and independently manufactured items, a network of trade routes made this drill possible.
The Fax machine was surprisingly time-consuming to take apart.
Inside the handset we discovered a nice speaker and mic, but also a piece of metal. Apparently, this was just a weight added by manufacturers so that it would feel heavier and hence of better quality. This is apparently common with a lot of audio equipment, a relic from a history where the heavy transformers in audio equipment actually did signal higher quality equipment. Aaron told us how when the CD player first came out, companies put cement blocks inside so that people would think they were fancy! When in fact, the components had just gotten smaller and lighter.
We also saw how the gear system inside the machine was arranged in order to control the motion provided by a very strong motor. While the main motor had a high RPM (rotations per minute) the gear system slowed down the rotation and provided greater torque.
We were also able to recover some interesting mirrors, optic material, and a solenoid. A lot of cookie-cutter components have a data sheet you can find, but when we found the lens for scanning, Aaron noted that might be a proprietary part, very hard to hack and re-use without supplementary information.
What became clear as we encountered *a lot* of tabbed plastic, is that one aspect of value-engineering in this case had been replacing screws with tabs. Aaron said that on newer equipment, this is even more common. Eliminating screws is one way to save money when you make a product for mass manufacture.
The last thing we took apart was an iMac. Aaron warned us it would be the most boring (he was right), since it doesn’t have a lot of easily reusable components. Still, we unscrewed it and Aaron used a suction cup on the bottom of a clamp to pull off the glass front and aluminum case (the right tool in this case!). Aaron said most of what he knows about the manufacture of Apple devices like these is from iFixit, a great repair site.
Thinking about all of the projects that might come from these components is both exciting but also striking. Yes, we had to dispose of a large amount of plastic and electronic waste, but we also got access to components that we would have otherwise bought.
Aaron suggested some of his favorite youtube channels for teardowns:
In future workshops, we would like to learn more about what are ways in which we can re-use these components (like how we did with Kat McDermott) but we will also discuss the emerging theories around critical making and new materialism. How does a mindset of dismantling allow us to understand the built world we engage with and how we can re-shape it?
Thank you to everyone who came, to Aaron Parsekian for carrying that gigantic fax machine and taking time to talk us through the process of tearing it down, and of course to the Office of Sustainability at NYU which is making this series possible.
We are developing a series of workshops around the deconstruction, maintenance, repair, and repurposing of electronic devices and components. The workshops will combine hands-on deconstruction and repurposing, which will supplement class work and support the development of student work, and discussion around the theory related to waste, capitalism, ecology, new materialism, critical making, and new terms in this realm we hope to discover. We want to open space to discuss the implications of design, production, and innovation in a cross-disciplinary way, and plan to invite guests related to both the practical and theoretical areas.
This project is the continuation of discussions at ITP and one workshop led by Kathleen McDermott, adjunct professor at IDM, inspired by the Dismantle/Repurpose weekend event held at Gallatin in Spring 2018, organized by Cyd Cippola, Professor at Gallatin. This project also builds on freeshare and exchange infrastructure already in place at ITP, a “free store” area for abandoned and/or discarded materials and projects, an electronics “garage sale” organized by students that allows for re-selling of used materials, and “Sustainable ITP” a student-led club.
Project Goals and Objectives:
Besides the workshops we have appointed a Free Store Steward This person will monitor the flow of materials and disposed electronics in what was formerly known as “The Junk Shelf”. The information gathered will allow us to better understand how the ITP/IMA community engages in the dismantling and critical making culture. Most importantly it will also inform ways in which we can improve the material flow within our own shop.
The ultimate goal is not only to open up the conversation, but improve the recycling infrastructure at ITP and develop skills within the community.