Beatriz Pozo Arcos

Beatriz Pozo Arcos has been working for iFixit since June 2022. She is working on the Repair Solutions Team where she, together with a fun team of repairability experts and enthusiasts, helps manufacturers move towards more repairable designs in their devices. The team also helps in setting up and sustaining repair ecosystems: making spare parts available, providing instructions on how to do repairs, and assessing the current ecosystem status.

Her tasks at the department involve helping to develop and refine iFixit’s Scoring Method, researching a number of topics relevant for repairs, helping develop workshops for manufacturers, and being up-to-date on European and North American repairability legislation like the Ecodesign Regulations, the French Repairability Index and the Digital Fair Repair Act.

Before joining iFixit, Beatriz got a PhD on Design for Repair at the Technical University of Delft, in the Netherlands. She investigated how to design products for an easy fault diagnosis-- the repair step before the actual repair that identifies the malfunction. In other words, the difficult part of a repair. You can read her thesis here.

She also got a Master of Science degree in Industrial Engineering. She studied it in Universities of Spain and France. Her favorite subjects were thermodynamics, fluid mechanics, and design engineering.

She went to high school in Spain and the US.

She speaks fluent Spanish (of course, her mother tongue), English, French, a bit of German, which she sometimes mixes with Dutch, and basic Chinese (enough to make sure the food is not extremely spicy).

Her experience as a Repair Solutions Consultant comes from her PhD on Circular Economy, where she learned to look at the big picture but also pay a lot of attention to details. Doing a PhD provided her with a research-oriented mindset, and a clear and concise (and academic) way of working and communicating. She always goes straight to the point. Her experience in research has also taught her how to collaborate and has made her reflect on how different we all are. As part of the PhD, she did a user observation study on how people fault diagnose defective household appliances. That was an eye-opening experience for her. You can read about it here.

Before that, she did an assistantship at Beijing’s University of Foreign Studies. She has also worked as a product developer intern for a multinational sports brand. She has volunteered at repair cafes in Rotterdam, and has helped middle school students with physics and math.

Her favorite fixes, as weird as it may sound, are ceramics. She loves the serendipity of how things break apart and the calmness it brings to put all the pieces back together.

As a record collector, she also enjoys repairing technics mk1200.

She also repairs clothes and whatever breaks down at home.

When she is not working you will find her reading, surfing, dancing, painting or playing chess. Surely, always staying positive and laughing hard.

You can check out Beatriz’s professional pages here:

• Google Academic
• LinkedIn

or find her in the ocean