Written by Last October, more than 3,500 repair events took place in 50 countries, all within a single two-week window. A broken radio somewhere in Querétaro. A jammed sewing machine in Bühl. A laptop that just needed a new battery in Portsmouth. Somewhere in that count there was probably one of GIG hubs, quietly doing what they always do.
This year, on 17 October, the count will grow again. For the first time, GIG is part of it as an official partner of International Repair Day, alongside make-a-thek. It is the day’s tenth edition, and the theme is “Repair Brings Us Together.”
International Repair Day is coordinated by The Restart Project, together with a growing group of partners: anstiftung, iFixit, Repair Café International, Repair & Share, HOP, PIRG, Repair Cafe Collective India, and now GIG and make-a-thek among them. Ten years in, the day has moved well past a symbolic gesture. Groups are already warming up: an XL Repair Café in Bühl, a maker fair in Brno, repair activities in schools across California, festivals in London and Portsmouth, textile workshops at the Museum of Making in Derby, a city-wide repair festival in Vienna. Hundreds of events are already on the map, months before the date itself.
This year’s theme asks something specific of everyone taking part. Not just to repair, but to repair with people you have not worked with before. A repair café teaming up with a local school. A hackerspace joining forces with a library or a scout group. A university opening its workshop for a Saturday afternoon. The Repair Day team is calling this a “repair festival,” and the idea is simple: use the act of fixing something as the reason to bring unfamiliar rooms into the same space.
For much of the Global North, Repair Day gives language and visibility to something still treated as a small act of resistance against planned obsolescence. For many of our own hubs across the Global Majority, repair was never something to rediscover. It is how tools, machines and materials have always been kept alive, because keeping them alive was never optional. That difference matters, and we would rather name it than smooth it over. Repair Day, done well, is a chance to put those two histories in the same room.
It also connects to something we are building right now inside the Global Innovation Academy. Our Material Valuer Curriculum, developed through the MLRA project (“Materialwissen gemeinsam weiterentwickeln”) and funded by Hans Sauer Stiftung, is turning years of community material knowledge into an open course. Every fixer who looks at a broken object and knows what is worth saving, what can be recombined and what should be let go is already practicing the judgment that curriculum is trying to formalize and pass on. Repair Day gives us thousands of small, distributed examples of exactly that kind of knowledge, already in motion.
So we would love to see the GIG community out there on 17 October, and around it. Host a repair event, a workshop, a mending session, a swap, or whatever makes sense in your local context. Have a look at the toolkit (now translated into Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Spanish and Swedish) for ideas and ready-made materials. Then add your event to the global map, and if you are registering as a GIG member, please mention GIG when you do. That is the way we get to see the shape of what our network is doing this year, and the size of the thing we add up to together.
If you want to talk through your plans first, the Repair Day team is holding a webinar on 10 September at 11am BST. You can register here.
Fixing something is never really about the object. It’s about who shows up to help you do it, and who you pass that knowledge to next.
See you on 17 October. 🔧
