The Disassembly Map: A new method to enhance design for product repairability

Designers and engineers need better tools and methods to create highly repairable products. Design for disassembly and reassembly is an important product related design feature that can enhance repair. In a highly repairable product, the components that fail most often should be easily accessible for repair or replacement. This paper...

Hotspot Mapping for product disassembly: A circular product assessment method

Designing products for the Circular Economy requires closing and slowing of loops by means of repair, reman-ufacturing, refurbishment, parts reuse and/or recycling. Ease of product disassembly facilitates these processes to be more cost-effective, resulting in a better circular strategy fit. In this paper we present the Hotspot Map-ping method....

Practices of fault diagnosis in household appliances: Insights for design

Fault diagnosis is the process of identifying and characterising a fault when a failure occurs. It is, therefore, an essential step to take before product-repair. In this study, we ask how conventional users diagnose faults in household appliances and how the design of these appliances facilitates or hampers the process of fault diagnosis.To...

Multidimensional sustainability assessment of solar products: Educating engineers and designers

Since 2008 the faculty of Industrial Design Engineering at the TU Delft hosts the minor Sustainable Design Engineering. The minor has been highly useful as a platform to pilot new ways of teaching engineering for sustainable development. Instead of having students make life cycle assessments and introduce them to straightforward checklists to...

Environmental sizing of smartphone batteries

Smartphone use has increased at a phenomenal pace worldwide. In 2011 more smartphones have been sold than desktop pc’s, notebooks, netbooks and tablets together. The total worldwide smartphone sales reached 472 million units in 2011, and 149 million of them were sold in the fourth quarter of 2011. The smartphone is, like almost every other...