Fighting premature obsolescence: Design guidelines to increase (expected) product lifetimes

Scientists have been warning for years about the consequences of the current take-make-waste system, and incremental change is needed to enable the environment to regenerate and move towards a sustainable society. Especially electronic waste (e-waste), which currently increases three times faster than regular waste and is hard to collect and recycle (The World Bank, 2021), is an increasing concern and an opportunity for improvement. In this project, the problem of premature obsolescence is addressed. The project investigates how to increase the lifetime of electronic consumer durables. By fully understanding how the consumers make replacement decisions, the decisions people make can be influenced. It turns out that as a product moves towards the expected lifetime, the perceived value of the product goes down, and the consumer is less likely to take care of the product or repair it when it breaks. Consequently, this project investigates how to increase the expected lifetime of products. This contributes to the Premature Obsolescence Multistakeholder Product Testing Program (PROMPT). PROMPT is working on a test program to assess the lifetime of products from a technical, user, and market perspective. The formulated assignment is to generate design guidelines that help to improve the expected product lifetime and illustrate this on a case example. The products that will be investigated are washing machines, televisions, vacuum cleaners, and smartphones. Two studies were performed. One qualitative study to get more insights in an explorative way, and a quantitative study to measure the most effective way to increase the expected lifetime. From the first study, it was concluded that people determine the expected lifetime at several moments throughout the lifetime of the product. Also, past experiences with the product, the average lifetime, the amount of warranty and expected change in demographics are factors that were considered by the participants while determining th
Strategic Product Design