A Service Design Tool for Repair

The Challenge

Increasing ‘repairability’ of products is important for reducing material waste. Most design guides for repairability up until now have focused on the physical product: making it as easy as possible to disassemble and replace parts. But design of a repair service around the product is equally important in making sure products are fixed, especially for busy. non-technical consumers.

The Outcome

A design tool was developed for guiding designers through creating a repairable product-service system. It characterises repair as mainly a troubleshooting process, and identifies 10 ”repair enablers” which are required to to complete any troubleshooting and repair of any product, and which a repair service system must provide.

A Service-Design Tool for Repair

The service design tool defines most of repair as “troubleshooting” – an iterative process of observation, action and decision. Understanding this is key to understanding the how design can aid each of these steps:

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In order to characterise what type of repair service a product should have, the types of observations, actions and decisions required to fix it must be noted. After this, ”troubleshooting enablers” are identified; user needs that the troubleshooting process is likely to require:

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An overview of the entire process is below:

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The full guide to the Repair Service Design Tool can be downloaded here, and printouts here.

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