Design for prolonged service lifetime : A case study of built-in ovens implementing emotionally durable design in practice

Sammanfattning: The taxonomy of sustainable design covers a multitude of strategies targeting different aspects of product design, one of which is product longevity. Efforts within this field have mainly been focusing on extending the technical lifetime of products, whereas the issue of products being discarded before technical malfunction have received less attention. This study set out to investigate how the service lifetime of products can be prolonged, i.e. the time a product stays in use. The pre-study further framed the issue to investigate how Emotionally Durable Design (EDD) could be implemented in practice. The study was done in collaboration with Electrolux, where built-in ovens as a case became the focal point of the project. This was a design research project with heavy emphasis on the user. Qualitative interviews with users regarding their relationships to products in general, their kitchens and ovens were conducted. The user insights combined with EDD-strategies from literature as well as Don Norman's theory of processing levels informed three design sprints performed by the authors. Four design concepts of built-in ovens targeting user engagement, confidence and product adaptability were developed. A framework including a methodology containing a tool and a design method was developed to ease the implementation of emotionally durable design in the appliance industry. The methodology is rooted in the learning outcomes of the process in this project. The method was based on the three levels of emotional processing: reflective, behavioral and visceral, and the tool on EDD-strategies from literature. There is potential and argument for EDD to be adopted by industry, but obstacles remain such as evaluation methods for emotional durability and financial incentives. For a successful strategy, multiple departments should work towards the same goal, as the emotional durability is influenced during the entire lifecycle, from marketing to discardment.