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 products carefully in daily life. Design has the potential to increase consumers' product care activities, but more knowledge and distinct strategies are needed by designers to purposefully design for this behaviour. We used three different approaches – a workshop with design students, an analysis of already existing products and services that have implemented aspects of product care, and an ideation session – to create eight strategies and 24 substrategies that can stimulate product care through design. These eight strategies are informing, enabling, social connections, appropriation, control, awareness, antecedents & consequences, and reflecting. To support designers in the implementation of these strategies, we transferred these strategies into a toolkit, which can be used in the product development process of different kinds of products. This paper describes the development of the product care strategies as well as the Product Care Toolkit.