A Sneaky Kettle: Emotionally Durable Design Explored in Practice

Emotionally durable design is a genre of sustainable design that aims at reducing consumption and waste by enhancing the durability of the relationship established between users and products. Several design strategies and theories have been published on this topic; nevertheless, it is still underexposed in practice. This paper presents a case study of an emotionally durable kettle, which is used to explore the topic in design practice. We build onto the existing ideas on emotional durability using the insights from the case study and propose five product qualities for emotionally durable products: involvement, animacy, adapt to self-identity, evoke memories, and rewarding.