Product lifecycle stages: Today's design shapes the end-of-(first)-life treatment for decades to come
20 Cards with Guidelines for Product Design Ready for Industry 4.0 in a Circular Economy
While the reuse, repair, refurbishing, remanufacturing, and recycling (ReX) of used products are currently performed mostly manually, future circular systems will increasingly rely on automation to extend product lifetimes and recover resources efficiently. To enable human-robot cooperative ReX, products need to be designed so that robots can easily identify, access, separate, test, clean, and/or reset components.
To support this, we developed 20 Design Cards with guidelines that illustrate the key requirements for disassembly in human-robot cooperative environments. Each card is double-sided:
- The red side highlights typical barriers to (robotic) disassembly,
- The green side proposes design improvements that enable more efficient automated handling.
The cards are organised into 4 core design topics:
- 1) Geometry & Surface: Cards 1-3
- 2) Diagnostic & Visibility: Cards 4-7
- 3) Product Composition: Cards 8-11
- 4) Connectors: Cards 12–20
The Design Cards are produced to support workshops in which participants explore sustainable design improvements, particularly for electronic and electromechanical products. Their illustrative examples help designers and engineers gain a better understanding and integrate robot-friendly product design principles from the outset of the design process.
The Design for ReX Cards were developed with the support of Flanders Innovation & Entrepreneurship (VLAIO) and partners working on future-proof circular product design and robotic demanufacturing.
