#6 - Decline of Tinkering
So engineering education doesn’t provide much hands-on experience, but why do so few have that experience outside of the classroom? Why aren’t people working on their cars or fixing appliances as much as they used to?
The easy answer is to turn to the generational argument about how people are getting softer and less willing to get their hands dirty. “Those damn millennials!” But how would that even happen? Maybe there was a national summit and a whole generation of toddlers met and passed a motion to stop tinkering. Seems a bit unlikely. It makes more sense to look at the changing conditions in society itself. In my view, the decline of do-it-yourself-er is a reaction to the way design itself has evolved.
You can start to get an idea of what has been going on when you look at how the engine bay has evolved over the years. The first picture is a Ford Mustang from 1965, the second a Ford Mustang from 2019.
The older car might look a little more chaotic, but you can see nuts and bolts, which are familiar enough that you know what tools to reach for. The modern car by contrast has plastic panels. Most don’t have visible fastenings and the design itself gives no clues on how to approach it. By experience, they are not very fiddle-able either. When I mess with trim pieces, I feel like I’m bound to break a little plastic tab off at any moment. Without going beyond the surface level of detail, you can see that the barrier to entry just to begin poking around is much higher in modern cars.
So how have we gotten to this point? Practically everything we interact with is built by large corporations. And at large corporations, profit reigns supreme. Profit does not come from things lasting decades. Corporations now have an incentive to make designs that intentionally make repairs difficult. In fact, in the last decade, a law had to be passed called the Right to Repair. In the automotive version, this allows independent shops to level the playing field a bit with dealers by giving them equal access to diagnostic information from cars. Manufacturers went so far with their attempt to make things unfixable that a law was required to back them off a bit. But what incentive do they have to make designs that are more accessible to the layperson? None whatsoever.
Damn millennials!