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.

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To realize the shift towards a Circular Economy, products should stay usable as long as possible. Maintaining products is the most efficient way of retaining their desired level of performance. This is called Product care. Product care can be understood as any action that helps to prolong the lifetime of a product. The aim of this thesis is to explore how designers can stimulate users to perform product care activities. This goal has been reached through a practice-based approach and connecting it with strategies from existing literature. This took place at the University of Technology Delft. The context of Product care and the product care behavior of end-users have been researched through a diary study, a micro-emotion scan, creative sessions with design students and literature regarding repair and maintenance. This revealed two things, there are 7 types of product care and each user has a different profile regarding their skills, motivations and barriers. This shows that analyzing which type of product care you are aiming for and defining your specific user are essential requirements. To develop design strategies for Design for Product care various methods were used. A brainstorm session with designers was held to develop product solutions that stimulate product care. An ideation session was held by myself and real product examples were collected that already stimulate Product care. The product solutions were used to cluster into design strategies. The clustering process led to 8 design strategies: experiences, enabling, informing, change, reflecting, social, control and appropriation. hese can be linked to existing strategies and theories regarding Circular, Emotion-centered and Behavioral design. to transfer the knowledge about the design strategies to designers a design tool was developed. The process was iterative and the 2 biggest iterations were tested with design students and designers. These tests showed that a few important criteria for the test were that it should teach the designer about the different types of product care, the design strategies and they should take the type of user and product into consideration. The tool needs to provide a sense of structure, and still be flexible to fit everyone’s process. It should provide examples of how a design strategy is implemented into a design. The final tool is the Product Care Kit, a set of magnetic cards used for brainstorming, ideating and discussing. It presents the most important factors which influence Product care. The set consists of the following cards: persona cards, product cards, product care type cards, design strategy cards and example cards with product solutions for each design strategy. This tool helps to analyze and understand the context which you are designing for. It helps to create conceptual design ideas for product care. In the future this tool should be further evaluated with designers in practice and taught to design students.The outcomes of the tool should be validated by end-users. The tool can potentially lead to sustainable care behavior and lead to physically and emotionally durable products.