"No Fun, but Very Effective": Consumers' Evaluation of Design Strategies for Product Care

Product care describes consumers' activities to prolong the lifetime of a product, such as repair, maintenance or careful handling. By keeping the product in a functional state, replacement can be postponed. Previous research has identified eight design strategies that can foster product care among consumers. To use these design strategies to...

Stimulating Consumers to Exclusively Purchase Products of Long-term Psychological Value

In the last decade, an increasing amount of people has become aware of the negative impact their behaviour has on the environment. However, most consumers are not aware of the negative environmental impact of the products they purchase and possess. Research has been done on different aspects of products for a circular economy, such as product...

How to Stimulate People to Take Care of Products? – The Development of a Toolkit for Designers

Taking care of products is an important aspect of sustainable consumer behaviour, because it is an appropriate approach to prolong products' lifetimes. Although consumers in general agree on this and demonstrate a general motivation to take care of their products, previous research has shown that they struggle to repair, maintain or treat their...

Strategies for food longevity

Although food has been circular by nature, the current food supply chain has turned into an unfortunate linear system. The challenges of transitioning towards a sustainable food eco-system requires radical changes and new perspectives, where things are done differently. Starting with related work in the field of design for product longevity, the...

Consumers' attitudes towards product care: An exploratory study of motivators, ability factors and triggers

To contribute to a more sustainable way of consumption, products should stay usable as long as possible. Therefore, it is necessary to take care of products. Product care should be understood as any action that helps prolonging the lifetime of a product, such as maintenance, repair etc. These product care activities can be conducted by the...

Decontaminating experiences with circular offerings

Keeping a product offering in the system through continued use and between multiple users creates the potential for interactions which become contaminated. These contaminated interactions can cause a barrier to material circulation and extended product lifetimes. This study seeks to identify the underlying design strategies useful in addressing...

Towards a sufficiency-driven business model: Experiences and opportunities

Business model innovation is an important lever for change to tackle pressing sustainability issues. In this paper, ‘sufficiency’ is proposed as a driver of business model innovation for sustainability. Sufficiency-driven business models seek to moderate overall resource consumption by curbing demand through education and consumer engagement,...

Extending product life by introducing symbolic meaning: An exploration of design strategies to support subjective well-being

Because products are often discarded while still fully functioning, it may be possible to support durability with design that stimulates a more enduring product-owner relationship. This paper is based on the proposition that one promising approach to support such prolonged relevance is by developing products with a higher predisposition for the...