Analysis of attachment strategies in methods and tools to assess environmental aspects in conceptual designs

Designing products that encourage attachment with the user helps to postpone product replacement. Emotional Durability Design Nine (EDDN) is a framework to think about attachment during the product design process. It is composed of 38 attachment strategies classified in 9 themes: relationships, narratives, identity, imagination, conversations, consciousness, integrity, materiality and evolvability. The objective of this work is to explore how many of the strategies compiled at EDDN are considered in methods and tools that assess environmental aspects or circularity in conceptual designs. To address this, all the parameters of eleven tools are compared against the 38 strategies. As a result, 50 attachment factors have been identified in these methods. Ecodesign Pilot has the biggest number of attachment factors, 12, followed by CE Designer with 8 and Circular Design Tool with 7. “Ensuring quality, durability and reliability” and “design for variability and modularity” are the most frequent strategies. CE Designer, Circular Design Tool, Ecodesign Pilot and Fast Five Philips include attachment as an overall parameter concerning the relationship with the user. Even though almost all the methods and tools analysed consider attachment, there are many product attachment strategies lacking, in particular those for the categories of narratives, imagination, conversations, consciousness and materiality. Conceptual designs with many attachment features could be rated in the four tools that consider attachment as an overall parameter. But with the other methods and tools, those designs would be underrated. These findings help designers to choose a tool to compare design concepts when attachment is a key factor.