Last week, I opened my dryer to find that the clothes inside had been twisted into a Gordian knot because they had caught on a broken piece of the filter enclosure. My favorite T-shirt was a casualty. I’m relatively handy, so I fetched my tools and got to work, but I quickly realized that removing these parts wasn’t easy: it required yoga-like dexterity, a flashlight, and a lot of cursing.

Once I identified which pieces I needed, I got online, and Google sent me to a site to find the parts. I ordered both, but they came in at different times and the filter was wrong. I reordered that part, hacked a fix for the one, and hoped the dryer wouldn’t destroy more clothes. As a designer, I knew there had to be a better way.

The right to repair is on the ballot in at least 20 US states, and as of last month, 28 attorneys general have called for legislation. The various bills generally outline requests like access to information, part availability, and fair pricing with respect to repairs. These are important actions, but they could go further. Products could be designed to be repaired from the start, and technology could facilitate repair along the spectrum of a product’s lifecycle.

Throughout the twentieth century, planned obsolescence was responsible for huge economic growth, but amidst a worsening climate crisis and economic turbulence, it’s time for companies to refocus on planned longevity. Here are several ideas for how they can make design to repair part their product strategy:

THINK OF REPAIRABILITY AS A FEATURE

Among companies that manufacture dryers, energy efficiency, capacity, and technology are high on their feature list. Only a small handful focus on sustainability, and Miele, has a decent focus on repair, with a section containing how-to videos, spare parts, and if all else fails, technical support for product repair.

This contrasts with my Kenmore which, when choosing repair on their site, leads only to repair service. But neither of their dryers are designed from the start to be repaired. I spoke to Andy Logan, an industrial designer and founder of product design studio AWOL Design, who says repairability is at odds with many companies’ view of successful design.

“Companies have never wanted people to fix their own products, and our designs do more to stop disassembly than facilitate it,” he says. When I asked him why it was so hard to access the screws to get at my filter assembly, he added: “We try to hide fasteners, not expose them.”

Design teams often adhere to a set of principles developed and aligned to a company’s goals. These principles help guide their design work—they communicate what matters most. Amongst designers, the most famous design principles are those of Dieter Rams, who dedicated two of his ten principals to the idea of product longevity and sustainability. Rams believed in lasting design, but even he didn’t go as far as advocating for durability—his primary concern was ensuring the visual design was timeless.

Today, longevity must go beyond aesthetics, and some companies are already at work. The design consultancy 42T, for example, has laid out some excellent principles for repairability: these include durability, disassembly, modularity, emotion, and communication. These can only work if the company embraces them as part of the value proposition of the products they make. Patagonia, too, has a specific design principle for the repair. Too bad they don’t make dryers.

LEVERAGE AI IN THE DESIGN PROCESS

There is an opportunity to use new technologies, specifically generative AI, to manufacture more repairable products. Working with AI to optimize a design can reduce material and provide increased strength by calculating the optimum material-to-structure ratio in the design. Often the parts end up looking like an HR Geiger spaceship. However, if designers could optimize a design for repairability using the principles above, how might the AI revise the design of components to provide easy access to the internal structure of the product in order to repair it as needed?

What if the manufacturer offered automated 3D illustrations of the CAD drawings to help communicate how to disassemble and repair your product? Neural radiance fields (NeRFs) are increasingly used to create 3D representations of physical objects, and algorithms like SayCan are improving our ability to teach machines how to understand logical sequences of discrete physical actions based on computer vision inputs. Further, Nvidia offers Omniverse, which could, in theory, model my laundry room and my dryer while highlighting the parts that need to be fixed—and how.

CONSIDER SMART REPAIR

If the product was designed initially to be easily disassembled, it opens up a great deal more opportunity for repair both at home and in the aggregate. But leveraging additional AI is also possible. The good folks over at KungFu.ai informed a different take on the product lifecycle. With predictive and prescriptive analytics, product maintenance and repair could be forecast and applied. In the case of my dryer, if a belt was most likely to break (or the filter in my case), the manufacturer could send me a notification at the predicted time.

What if the manufacturer sent a truck designed as a kind of mobile disassembly line? A dryer in need of maintenance could be loaded into the back and within the truck, disassembled, cleaned, repaired then reassembled.

ENHANCE HOME REPAIR

Providing an instruction manual and making parts available is an important step for the right-to-repair legislation, but companies can do more.

First, companies can deliver customized content in the form of engaging videos of the repair of their products, rather than leaving this to third-party services or content creators.

Second, manufacturers can partner with companies like Home Depot. There are currently 2700 Repair Cafes around the world, but what if a behemoth like Home Depot offered its own repair service or classes and tool discounts?

Lastly, through the clever application of AI, manufacturers could offer automated services through their websites that gave people specific information about the repair needed. Based on a prompt with the model number, ChatGPT gave me specific parts to search for and a video. One of the parts was incorrect, so the system was imperfect, but what if a manufacturer loaded up its own data into a large language model (LLM) in order to provide better data? Companies like Instacart, Shopify, and Buzzfeed are already using LLMs for customer service, so this would be a logical next step for a manufacturer.

It’s increasingly clear that repairability is something that people want. Right-to-repair legislation represents a policy change driven by voters. With the rise of repair cafes, do-it-yourself, and the supply chain issues that arose over the last several years because of COVID, we may be at the forefront of a cultural shift. This shift recalls a time when people had to be more resilient and repair their own possessions, but it also hints at a more sustainable future.

Looking to the past, we can find inspiration in something like Kintsugi, the Japanese art of fixing pottery with a gold seam along the crack embrace and highlight the break. If manufacturers designed whole product lines for repair and durability and recenter manufacturing locally to reduce the possibility of disrupted supply chains, they could achieve planned longevity.