Eco-design is an umbrella term that incorporates several sub-strategies companies can use to improve the environmental performance of their products. Eco-design takes a product-centric view and focuses on reducing and eliminating environmental and human health-related impacts as well as resource depletion. Many products can become more eco-efficient through smarter design, for example by reducing the amount of materials needed in production or the consumption of energy in use. There are numerous reasons why businesses may engage with eco-design. One is to comply with present or upcoming regulations. Another is to save costs by being able to use recycled materials. Businesses might also attract customers willing to pay a premium price for green products. Building on the idea of ecodesign, the product’s entire lifecycle must also be examined in the design phase when designing for circularity. To help ensure the reuse of products and their parts, products should be designed to align with the value propositions of circular business models. Researchers have identified 6 different circular design strategies that may be chosen depending on the business model. Strategy number one: Design for attachment and trust, this encourages users to bond with the product and can help extend product lifespan, as the user is less likely to discard the product if they feel a strong emotional attachment. If you are like me, you probably have some things that you’ve held onto from your childhood because of the sentimental reasons. Number 2, Design for durability, this increases product reliability and reduces the possibility of failure. When defining a product’s durability, designers should aim to match the economic and stylistic life span of the product. For example, it does not make sense in terms of both cost and material resource consumption for one-time-use packaging to be extremely durable. Number 3, Design for standardisation and compatibility, this means designing product parts to be interchangeable to enable repair and product life extension. If replacement parts are readily available and compatible with multiple products, products may be more easily reused. This can also help reduce overall consumption as one product can be used for different purposes. For example, I can charge both my phone and tablet with the same charger instead of needed two different chargers. Number 4, Design for maintenance and repair, this aims to extend product lifetimes by increasing the ease of product maintenance. Repair is often laborious and in countries with high labor taxes, it can be relatively more expensive to repair a product instead of just buying a new one. Reducing the number of components or simplifying how parts are joined - for example by avoiding the use of adhesives - can help companies decrease repair time and cost. And it can also enable you, the user, to more easily repair your things yourself. But this can be a challenge if repair manuals or spare parts are unavailable. Number 5, Design for adaptability and upgradability, this allows for future product modification. Functional updates can allow a products function to change over time, such as a child's high chair that can be turned into a dining room chair as the child ages. Technical updates like updating a computer to a new operating system allow products to adapt to technological change. But the speed of technological development sometimes limits upgradability possibilities. And lastly, number 6, Design for ease of disassembly and reassembly, this often goes hand in hand with design for ease of maintenance and repair. By designing products and parts so they can be taken apart and reassembled, this strategy not only enhances reparability and reusability of products and components but also makes the products easier to recycle. In addition to these six strategies, two other strategies are often discussed in parallel with circular design and sustainable materials management: design for recycling and design for dematerialization. Design for recycling focuses on using specific design techniques to increase material recoverability in the recycling process. This includes avoiding the use of mixed-materials so that products can be more easily to recycle. Finally, product design can also help to further dematerialisation by, for instance, reducing packaging or using nanomaterials which have the potential for using less materials while maintaining or even improving functionality. In some cases of dematerialization, the product may actually be replaced by a service which uses less resources. One example of this is the move toward streaming films instead of purchasing DVDs or Blu-ray disks.