Designing for Longevity: Expert Strategies for Creating Long-Lasting Products

Product longevity is one of the cornerstones in the transition towards a more sustainable society and a key driver for the circular economy model. This book provides designers, developers, and creators with five distinctive expert strategies, detailed case studies, action guides and worksheets that support both beginning and advanced design practitioners in creating new product concepts with long-lasting strategic fits.

Designing for Longevity shows how expert design teams create original and long-lasting product concepts from the early development phase. It focuses on integrating business knowledge, market conditions, company capabilities, technical possibilities and user needs into product concepts to make better strategic decisions. It demonstrates how, for products to be durable, designers must create a long-lasting strategic fit for the customer, company, and market. Key case studies of products such as Bang & Olufsen’s A9, LEGO Ninjago and Friends and Coloplasts’ Sensura Mio, among others, offer readers inspiration, guidance and real-world insights from design teams showing how the strategies can be applied in practice. Action guidelines and worksheets encourage broad, analytical problem-solving to identify and think through challenges at the early concept stage.

Beautifully designed and illustrated in full colour throughout, this book combines original research and the hands-on tools and strategies that design practitioners need to create useful, sustainable products.