Sustainable Design
Design of resilient consumer products
anders haug
University of Southern Denmark
adg@sam.sdu.dk
Keywords: product resilience, emotional durability, sustainability, consumer product design
Abstract
Consumer product sustainability is a topic that has been of increasing interest to practice and academia in recent decades. In this context, a widely discussed means of achieving sustainability is to design more durable products, thereby reducing the need for the production of new products. In particular, the emotional perspective on product durability has received attention in recent design literature, since consumer products are often replaced long before they become physically non-functioning. However, the literature does not provide a full account of the causes of product replacement or of the means for making products more durable. This paper addresses these issues by defining the concept of ‘resilient product design’, providing a detailed classification of causes of product replacement, and organising means to extend product longevity. Hereby, the paper provides a more structured basis for designers to design resilient consumer products and for researchers to engage in further studies.
This paper is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International licence.
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Cite this paper: Haug, A. (2016) Design of Resilient Consumer Products. Proceedings of DRS 2016, Design Research Society 50th Anniversary Conference. Brighton, UK, 27–30 June 2016.
This paper will be presented at DRS2016, find it in the conference programme