Design for Repairability: Scoring Device Repairability Using Topic Modeling

Design for repairability is an important design practice to increase the useful life of consumer products and decrease environmental impact. The current design for repairability guidelines includes general practices that can be applied to a range of products across industries. However, these guidelines lack device-specific insights. This work consists of two complementary studies aimed at advancing design for repairability. The first study proposes a methodology for extracting repairability design insights from online product reviews. This would help repair-conscious designers identify device components that may need redesign and/or prioritize components to offer as replacement parts. In this study, topic modeling is performed on the product reviews with nonnegative matrix factorization (NMF) and BERTopic to identify topics regarding device failure modes for computer keyboards. While BERTopic produced more cohesive topics with fewer duplicates, NMF generated more incoherent topics. The proposed method identified several failure modes for computer keyboards, such as sticky keys, keyboard leg breakage, and instability in the keyboard base. The second study presents a case study on developing and applying a novel repairability score based on failure modes identified from online product reviews. This new method differs from existing approaches as it relies on real device failures compared to scores based on theoretical device failure modes. The study reveals that the repairability scores of the keyboards varied, primarily depending on the availability of repair instructions and replacement parts for addressing their specific failures. This suggests that providing targeted repair solutions for individual device failures can improve their repairability.