The Dutch government wants to be circular in 2050. The industry of kitchens and kitchen appliances needs new innovative models of practice to reduce its environmental footprint. As kitchen appliance manufacturer, ATAG Benelux is investing in innovation to create more sustainable and circular business propositions. In a circular economy products and materials have to ‘loop’ back into the system after they lost value, but ATAG’s current system is linear, bringing the appliances to the customer and not returning them. The aim of this thesis is to explore how ATAG can use design to contribute to a circular economy. It is a collaboration between ATAG Benelux and Delft University of Technology. This thesis focuses on the user, their behavior, and their attitudes towards Product Service Systems (PSS's) and Refurbishment as they play a big role in business models. As a case study, the combi-steam oven is used to explore PSS's. The user’s attitude towards refurbishment and circular PSS’s is explored through in-depth interviews. The results reveal several challenges in acceptance for different types of ownership of ovens and show that for the target group of ATAG a system of buy-back is most suitable. The context of retaining value for refurbishment was researched through literature, interviews, and creative sessions. This shows different directions for design to benefit the refurbishment process. The recommended circular business proposition is for ATAG to take back appliances after a use cycle. ATAG Benelux can refurbish its products to save materials and resources. For refurbishment it is important that products retain their value as long as possible. The final design consists of return incentives for users and the Care Assistant. This human centered design stimulates product care, which is a type of sustainable use and handling. The design will influence the user’s behavior in a sustainable way to retain more value, enable efficient refurbishment and a second life cycle. The product care is needed to have a longer product life, or to take back an appliance that is in a better state (than it would be if product care had not been stimulated). With a buy-back system, users are stimulated to return the appliances, rather than let the appliance end up in recycling or worse.

Although manufacturers, designers, product/service providers are innovating for more sustainable products and business models to promote sustainable consumption, there are still gaps between satisfactory user experience and real-sustainable use behaviours. HOMIE.B.V offers pay-per-use household appliances and services to stimulate sustainable user behaviours and aims to achieve a more sustainable white goods industry. The company developed its pay-per-use washing machine model and now introduces a pay-per-use dryer model. However, the service needs to be further developed, and the specific influencing factors of sustainable dryer use behaviours are still unclear. This thesis aimed to figure out the influencing factors in dryer use experiences and investigate how to persuade the users to use a pay-per-use dryer more sustainably. From a literature review and twelve customer interviews, the key influencing factors in accepting and performing sustainable dryer use behaviours were investigated and concluded into a behaviour model. A usage data analysis further proved that financial concern is not a deciding factor of performing sustainable actions, but the convenience concern is. The drivers and barriers generated the design challenge and design requirements, which contribute as a guideline to the design solution. The final design is a service strategy called HOMIE STAR plan, which uses a mobile app as a communication channel for providing a set of services. The service plan has two phases: the onboarding month and every 6-month evaluation. Customers can learn how to make use of the services and tools to dry their laundry sustainably and conveniently in the onboarding month and achieve sustainable goals by becoming a good laundry organizer in daily use. The service patterns to help customers perform sustainable dryer use behaviours are (1)dryer setting instructions with environmental impact; (2) a HOMIE Planner with sustainable-oriented recommendation system that connects to customers' daily schedule; (3)a community with quick Q&A and tips sharing; (4) a rewarding system with usage cost details. The prototyped concept and implementation suggestions were proposed and validated through interviews with potential dryer users, existing HOMIE customers, and HOMIE employees. HOMIE STAR plan made use of the identified influencing factors to persuade users to perform sustainable dryer use behaviours and meanwhile developed HOMIE's pay-per-use model services. The strategy provided HOMIE with a future direction of realizing its service value and sustainable goals on a larger scale and longer-term and suggested potential collaboration opportunities to influence other parts in the supply chain of the white goods industry. The project is focused explicitly on the pay-per-use dryer model but keeps an eye on the entire service of the company. The identified influencing factors and results can inspire other companies who are also trying to stimulate sustainable user behaviours.

The aim of this project was to design an end-of-use experience in a circular economy for the Apple iPhone. The main challenge was to find out what the obstacles were at the end-of-use. During this research it became clear that many consumers don’t do anything with their old phone when they buy a new one. These old iPhones are left forgotten in drawers. For a circular economy to work, consumers need to bring back their old phones to the store. In this way, valuable material won’t go to waste. To understand the user’s perspective, in dept interviews have been performed. It showed from these interviews that many users keep an old phone as a spare phone for when their current phone dies. But that after some time, these spare phones get “replaced” by other old phones. In this way the drawer with old phones is being created. After a while, these phones are left forgotten. The users often don’t know what data is on these phones. They don’t know what to do with it but can’t take distance from it. After the consumer research, the design goal of this research was created: “Users should be able to comfortably and efficiently back-up their data and then delete their personal information, while feeling reassured and confident. The interaction should become a trustworthy and standard operation”. The focus of the project was backing-up data from the iPhone, so that the users could feel reassured and confident about deleting data from their old phones, because they had stored their data somewhere save. This resulted in the final design of this project: BackUps. BackUps is an app where all old iPhones a user has had, are stored. The iPhones stored in BackUps are looking the same as they were when they were in use. To have this overview of old phones, the user might become less attached to the physical device, because they now see that all data has been stored in the BackUps. The data stored is stored in the iCloud. An implementation plan is also given. When users return their phone to the store, they will get storage as an incentive. This storage can be used for the data of their old phones.