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 solutions—we 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 psychologically-driven strategies thereby complement existing technology- and product-oriented design strategies. Furthermore, to facilitate implementation, a design toolkit has been developed that points to key requirements in practice.

Product care is defined as all activities initiated by consumers that encourage an extension of product lifetimes, such as repair, maintenance, and/or careful handling. A product care scale was developed and validated in a set of four related studies. In study 1, we asked experts to examine the face validity of a set of 35 items. In study 2, we reduced the initial set of items to 10 items using exploratory factor analysis. A subsequent confirmatory factor analysis supported a three-factor solution. Study 3, a nomological network study, demonstrated that the construct measured by our scale is related but still distinguishable from existing concepts, such as frugality, use innovativeness and attachment towards the product. Study 4 was a known-groups test with participants from two different countries and with various previous experiences in repairing. The final 10-item product care scale includes three factors: relevance, easiness and positive experience.

The aim of this PhD project is to understand and enhance consumers’ repair and maintenance activities. We define this behaviour, aimed at prolonging products’ lifetimes, as product care. For designers, it is important to understand consumers’ perspective on product care and to identify reasons why consumers either do or do not take care of their products. Only by doing so, can appropriate products and services be designed in the future. This PhD project first explores current product care behaviour and the individual tendency of persons to take care of their products. Afterwards, suitable design directions to enhance product care are developed and evaluated for multiple product categories. Based on the insights from this PhD project, designers can adjust their design in such a way that care activities are more likely to be executed.