Care practice and product-service system: design thinking towards user detachment from hibernating or accumulated clothing at end of use

The Carative Factors Inspirational Toolkit has been designed to provide a better understanding of the user’s relationship with hibernating or accumulated objects at end of use, and their responsible and decisive disposal, for designers, in order to create products, services and an environment that will influence users’ possession and sustainable disposal behaviour.

This paper explores the potential feasibility of adapting and applying the Toolkit to the clothing design process and its implication for a product-service system (PSS). Through exploratory online workshops, in which participants used the Toolkit to generate concepts, and in the subsequent PSS design process, several concepts were developed to inform different users’ decision-making process. This paper concludes that Toolkit has the potential to be applied to the brainstorming process in the clothing design sector to influence their design thinking towards enabling user detachment from hibernation or accumulated knitwear at end of use, and contributed to a PSS model by providing an opportunity to generate business and economic opportunities.