Design for Repair as a Strategy to Foster Sustainable User Behavior: A Case of Undergraduate Product Design Studio (original) (raw)
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Integrating Repair into Product Design Education: Insights on Repair, Design and Sustainability
Sustainability, 2021
With the pressure of growing environmental problems, the world is changing, and so is the paradigm of design. Accordingly, the calls for change in design education are increasing throughout the literature day by day. As the designers of the future, students must be prepared for alternative scenarios. This paper provides insights into students’ learning outcomes and competencies related to repair and sustainability in the context of an assignment that integrates repair into design education. This assignment has been part of the master’s degree design course at Linköping University for the last 3 years. During these 3 years, 52 repair projects, including a diverse range of products, were developed. Aiming to find out the insights of this process, focus group sessions were conducted. As a result of these focus group sessions, 12 insights were developed, such as the concepts of brokenness, designed repair, and repair-worthy objects. Findings show that practices of repair constitute comp...
Influencing product lifetime through product design
Business Strategy and the Environment, 2005
This article investigates the possibility of influencing product lifetime through product design. First, the results of a literature study on consumer behavior are presented. These show that surprisingly few researchers have focused specifically on the arousal of the need to replace a product. Therefore, empirical data about motives for product replacement were acquired through a combination of qualitative investigation and a quantitative survey. This resulted in a model of factors influencing the replacement decision and in a replacement typology. Finally, possible design directions for longer lasting products were explored. It was concluded that despite the variety of replacement motivations people basically want a well functioning and up to date product that meets their altering needs. This requires the development of dynamic and flexible products, which implies designing for variability and product attachment and preparing the product for future repair or upgrading.
DRS2018: Catalyst, 2018
User repair can prolong product lifespan and support in turn the transformative Circular Economy agenda. Current research concerning user motivations and propensity to repair differs as to the extent at which users' environmental concerns influence repair propensity. Because of this, the focus of this study is on potential individuals with pro-environmental inclination, as a mean to identify the factors supporting and hindering repair. To this end, an in-depth survey exploring factors influencing repair propensity for electrical and electronic goods was executed. Findings from 208 respondents affiliated with pro-environmental communities identify innovativeness and frugality traits as significant factors influencing repair propensity. Qualitative analysis has shown the significance of financial considerations in deciding to repair or replace, and how access to helping relationships alleviate most of the barriers to repair, including lack of access to repair shops and lack of knowledge and skills. The findings of this study provide much needed insight into repair behaviour. Furthermore, the insights provided will aid researchers and policy makers to develop appropriate interventions to support repair. Circular economy, Consumer Behaviour, Repair, Product lifespan ''I was not happy about someone I didn't know repairing it as it had sensitive data on it (research data, stored passwords etc.)'' Although negligible in number, it is important to consider the rise in items with embedded data and electronics which may deter users from repairing items.
Embracing Products: Prolonging Lifetime through Product Care Activities by Repair Enthusiasts
2021
People tend to give more attention to the products they feel attached to and exhibit preservative behaviours to keep them for a longer time (Mugge et al., 2008). Maintenance and repair, named as product care behaviours by Ackermann (2018), are examples of the user's preservation method that strengthens the user-product relationship and eventually leads to a longer usage period. That is why these activities require a closer look of the researchers in the design for sustainability area, since the pile of prematurely thrown away products is getting bigger every day while resources are constantly depleting. Therefore, in this paper, findings from and insights into a graduate research will be presented, focusing on the implications of product care activities for strengthening the emotional attachment (Hernandez et al., 2020) between people and objects, and empowering people in possible ways in the process of enabling product longevity. To do so, first, the motivations behind product care activities and what is worthy for individuals to preserve are examined through semi-structured interviews conducted with repair enthusiasts that are also the members of repair-related initiatives. Afterwards, the techniques and skills involved in the process of maintenance and repair are explored. Key findings from the graduate research are as follows: the more people are engaged with product care activities, the more the transition of people's role from passive consumers to active users is eased. The change in user attitudes towards their product strengthens their emotional attachment and eventually serves for product longevity. While the user-product relationship is evolving, formerly obscure objects are transformed to be more open and transparent for their users. Lastly, repair-related initiatives are significant actors in encouraging and helping people to conduct product care behaviours.
If it's broken don't just fix it: Exploring Repair as Design through a two-week design charrette
Design for Adaptation Cumulus Conference Proceedings, 2022
Repairing products has a long history but is not a commonplace practice today. Many products end up in landfills without even being considered repairable, and this is one of the reasons for our unsustainable, linear production system. This paper explores repair’s potential as an act of design by exploring the results of a two-week design charrette conducted with forty-seven industrial design students at The Ohio State University in Spring 2022. Fourteen teams of students received broken, donated, or unwanted products to repair and were challenged to learn more about how design could inform repair activities. The results encouraged instructors to conclude that design-led repair has a valuable role to play in design education – especially as a lesson that supports design’s contribution to the creation of a sustainable, circular future. Making unwanted, broken, or dysfunctional items useful demonstrated repair’s potential to expand knowledge of materials, techniques, and tools, along with reconsidering users’ needs. It also emphasized the benefits of making repairability central to the design of manufactured objects.
Innovative approaches to optimising design and use of durable consumer goods
International Journal of Product Development, 2008
The classical market economy provided basis for emergence of a throwaway society that is based on economies of scale, manufacturing of short-lived average quality products, planned obsolescence and consequent ever-growing demand of consumers for new products and services. This society is clearly unsustainable. An alternative model is the so-called circular economy based on optimised product life span, extended services and remanufacturing activities. The aim of this paper is to understand the complexity of the product durability discourse from environmental and economic perspectives and from the viewpoint of different stakeholders and to discuss innovative strategies that can address some of the identified eco-design bottlenecks in product durability by maximising utilisation rate and improving value of durable products for users, which altogether can contribute to understanding of how the alternative model of circular economy could be facilitated. The ideas outlined in the paper can be of interest for strategic product designers, business managers and for environmental managers of companies that either produce durable products or deliver services of durable products.
"Post-use design thinking is an approach for sustainability which enables a product to be reused in a new context after completing its initial use. People tend to re-use objects intuitively when they find the potential to re-contextualize them regardless of designer’s intention. If a designer proposes an object for re-use, she/he should also be aware of the local knowledge in terms of people’s needs, experiences and preferences related to post-use behaviours. Post-use design solutions would be well accepted and implemented if the user knowledge informs the early stages of product design and development process. This study aims to explore how the user observations inform the post-use dimensions and design solutions, and how that information is incorporated into the idea generation phase of the design process. To investigate this further, an undergraduate design project with an emphasis on post-use design thinking has been selected as the scope of this study. Keywords: sustainability, user observations, post-use, idea generation, product design and development process"
Journal of Sustainability Research, 2021
Background: Taking care of products is a relevant approach to prolong products' lifetimes and retain their desired level of performance, and is thus an important aspect of sustainable consumer behaviour. Although consumers have a general motivation to take care of their products, previous research has shown that they struggle to repair, maintain or treat their products carefully in daily life. Design has the potential to increase consumers' product care activities, but designers need more knowledge and distinct strategies to evoke this product care behaviour with consumers. Methods: By the means of a multi-method approach-individual and group brainstorming sessions as well as an analysis of existing solutionswe created a large number of ideas on how to stimulate product care among consumers. Results: We were able to summarize these ideas in a clustering session into eight strategies and 24 sub-strategies that can foster product care through design. These eight strategies are: social connections, informing, enabling, appropriation, control, awareness, antecedents & consequences, and reflecting. The integration of the consumer perspective into strategies for product care extends currently known design strategies for repair and maintenance. To support designers in the implementation of these strategies, we developed a toolkit that can be used in the product development process of different product categories. Conclusions: This paper identifies product care strategies that have a distinct focus on the consumers' perspective of sustainable behaviour and that can be stimulated through design. These rather psychologicallydriven strategies thereby complement existing technology-and productoriented design strategies. Furthermore, to facilitate implementation, a design toolkit has been developed that points to key requirements in practice.
A UTS Design Studies Project #repairdesign
Report, 2020
Design is deeply implicated in the urgent challenge of reducing waste in the twenty-first century. From hermetically sealed smartphones to fast fashion, from brittle plastic appliances to cheap chipboard furniture, we are living in a throwaway culture that is globally networked in a seemingly opaque system of mass-produced imports and waste exports. This, combined with planned obsolescence and technological complexity, means that repair can seem a distant and difficult possibility.