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This paper explores existing design strategies, guidelines and product features that enable functional recovery operations like repair, refurbishing or remanufacturing. A circular economy demands for products to be kept as valuable as possible for as long as possible. Therefore, recovery operations should be easy to perform in an efficient manner, which is influenced by product design. As a result of the literature review conducted, this paper presents a categorization of functional recovery guidelines for product design and identifies the need to plan for recovery at early design stages.

Understanding the extent of common users' capabilities to repair products themselves, and the barriers during the repair could help legislators and manufacturers improve the design of products. This paper investigates users' capacity for using various common repair tools, their experience in repairing different household appliances, and the degree to which greater repair experience enables them to overcome related barriers to repair. Data was collected through questionnaires by 276 participants. Most respondents said they were able to use basic mechanical tools, but less than half stated proficiency in using soldering irons or multi-meters for repair. This indicates that more users may be able to perform diagnosis and repair of mechanical problems than electrical problems. However, 74% have repaired an electronic household appliance at least once in their lifetime (even if the repairs were mechanical). This suggests that repair could be a widespread activity. Users with no repair experience listed significantly more design-related barriers to repair than users with repair experience. These design-related barriers mostly concerned diagnosis and disassembly. Thus, designing products with features facilitating ease of diagnosis and disassembly with basic tools could remove some of the major barriers towards repair, and stimulate more users to repair their products.

Product repairs are at the core of sustainable consumption and user manuals can play a relevant role in facilitating them. They are the accredited source of product information for end users and are therefore sought as an important means for the diagnosis and subsequent repair of household appliances. However, despite increasing societal demand for repairable products, few studies have been conducted on the extent to which manuals contribute to the fault diagnosis and subsequent repair process. In this study, we analysed current guidance provided by manuals for the diagnosis process, answering the research question: ‘To what extent do user manuals provide sufficient information to diagnose the most frequent faults in household appliances?’ We examined the diagnosis instructions provided in the user manuals of four different household appliances using data on the appliances’ most frequently failing components, and a framework that considers three steps towards a successful diagnosis: fault detection, fault location, and fault isolation. In total, we analysed 150 user manuals of 48 brands available on the European market. We show that manuals do not instruct the diagnosis of frequently failing components. They mainly refer to causes of failure and directly recommend corrective actions after fault detection. Thus, they rarely include a three-step fault diagnosis process to identify and isolate a faulty component. Based on these results, we have extended the framework for the process of fault diagnosis to include a step from cause identification to corrective action. Both routes, the component-oriented and the cause-oriented route in fault diagnosis, should be considered during the design of products for easy fault diagnosis, and should be included in future regulations that address product reparability.