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:

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:

An overview of the entire process is below:

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