Emotional Durability Design Nine: A Tool for Product Longevity

Merryn Haines-Gadd, Jonathan Chapman, Peter Lloyd, Jon Mason, Dzmitry Aliakseyeu

    Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

    Abstract

    How can we develop products that consumers want to use for longer? The lifetime of electrical products is an ongoing concern in discussions about the circular economy. It is an issue that begins at an industry level, but that directly influences the way in which consumers use and discard products. Through a series of workshops and knowledge exchange sessions with Philips Lighting, this paper identifies which design factors influence a consumer’s tendency to retain their products for longer. These were distilled into a guiding framework for new product developers—The Emotional Durability Design Nine—consisting of nine themes: relationships, narratives, identity, imagination, conversations, consciousness, integrity, materiality, and evolvability. These nine themes are complemented by 38 strategies that help in the development of more emotionally engaging product experiences. We propose that the framework can be applied at multiple points during the new product development process to increase the likelihood that ‘emotion building’ features are integrated into an end product.
    Original languageEnglish
    Pages (from-to)1-19
    Number of pages19
    JournalSustainability
    Volume10
    Issue number6
    DOIs
    Publication statusPublished - 11 Jun 2018

    Bibliographical note

    © 2018 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).

    Keywords

    • emotionally durable design
    • product longevity
    • consumer behavior
    • circular design
    • product design

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