Integrating Repair into Product Design Education: Insights on Repair, Design and Sustainability

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Line 110- incomplete sentence

Line 316- replace contracting with contrasting.

Introduction:
Inclusion of the project brief and/or project schedule given to the students would have helped frame the discussion piece about the students' project experience. Also this would ensure other educators can learn from the project and apply aspects across their teaching. 

Repair Insights:
An interesting cross-section of themes are presented in this section. The examples of the projects and products make the themes tangible and visible.

Discussion:
In the discussion the researchers offer some criticism on current design processes e.g. overly focused on novelty and new technologies (Line 38) and the shifting focus of designing for new vs designing for repair (line 388), these could be expanded upon and unpacked in more depth to give the paper a more critical perspective on contemporary design practice. I feel the authors are perhaps playing it too safe by not 

Author Response

Response to Reviewer 1 Comments

Point 1: Line 110- incomplete sentence

Line 316- replace contracting with contrasting.

Response 1: We corrected the incomplete sentence (Line 110) and the wording problem (Line 316).

Point 2: Introduction: Inclusion of the project brief and/or project schedule given to the students would have helped frame the discussion piece about the students' project experience. Also this would ensure other educators can learn from the project and apply aspects across their teaching.

Response 2: We thank Reviewer 1 for this comment because we think it was helpful for the manuscript to reach its potential related to reaching other educators. To answer this comment, we added the assignment brief in Appendix A.

Point 3: Repair Insights: An interesting cross-section of themes are presented in this section. The examples of the projects and products make the themes tangible and visible.

Response 3: We thank Reviewer 1 for this positive comment.

Point 4: Discussion: In the discussion the researchers offer some criticism on current design processes e.g. overly focused on novelty and new technologies (Line 38) and the shifting focus of designing for new vs designing for repair (line 388), these could be expanded upon and unpacked in more depth to give the paper a more critical perspective on contemporary design practice. I feel the authors are perhaps playing it too safe by not 

Response 4: We thank Reviewer 1 for pointing this out because we think the critical perspective is stronger in the article now. To answer this comment, we added a paragraph starting on line 44 and unpacked the argument about current design practice overly focusing on new. We also criticized contemporary design practice and design education further between the lines 401 and 410.

We thank Reviewer 1 very much for their time and effort in reviewing our manuscript and for providing constructive and helpful comments. We carefully addressed all the reviews and tracked the changes that we made to the manuscript in the document. We believe that these changes have significantly strengthened the paper. We hope Reviewer 1 will find the paper improved.

Reviewer 2 Report

A really interesting piece of research on a relevant and timely subject for design research and practice. There is great value in understanding how design education needs to adapt to the current ecological crisis and integrate new learning for future design practitioners. 

It would have been interesting to have some more detail on the three phases of the repair design process identified in the paper, and how, as a design process, the activities of the repair project fit into this approach. It would have been good to see this illustrated as a design process diagram or flow to make clear the different phases and what constitutes each one in your example. 

Extrapolating some of the future design competencies needed and a bit more discussion on what they mean for future design practice would have been interesting. There are obviously some specific skills that were employed, knowledge of materials for example seemed important as well as creative thinking at the early stages, and drawing those out as potential focus ares for the future would be interesting. 

Also some wider discussion on the impact on future product design practice, and the new competencies that this exercise has instilled in students learning. Is the learning valuable for both designing a repair of existing products and designing for repair when conceiving a new product? 

There are obviously other existing approaches to designing for sustainable eco-centred products and some thoughts on how the insights from this work compliment, add too, or other wise impact on these approaches would be an interesting part of the discussion. 

Author Response

Response to Reviewer 2 Comments

Point 1: A really interesting piece of research on a relevant and timely subject for design research and practice. There is great value in understanding how design education needs to adapt to the current ecological crisis and integrate new learning for future design practitioners.

Response 1: We highly appreciate that Reviewer 2 finds our article interesting and sees great value in it.

Point 2: It would have been interesting to have some more detail on the three phases of the repair design process identified in the paper, and how, as a design process, the activities of the repair project fit into this approach. It would have been good to see this illustrated as a design process diagram or flow to make clear the different phases and what constitutes each one in your example. 

Response 2: We really appreciate this comment because it gave us the opportunity to write more about the repair design process. To answer this comment, we added a paragraph describing the phases of the repair design process (line 438-471) and provided a diagram in Figure 5. We also explained how the activities of the repair project fit into this approach.

Point 3: Extrapolating some of the future design competencies needed and a bit more discussion on what they mean for future design practice would have been interesting. There are obviously some specific skills that were employed, knowledge of materials for example seemed important as well as creative thinking at the early stages, and drawing those out as potential focus ares for the future would be interesting. 

Response 3: We thank Reviewer 1 for this constructive comment. We added a paragraph (line 376-387) and wrote about future design competencies to answer this comment.

Point 4: Also some wider discussion on the impact on future product design practice, and the new competencies that this exercise has instilled in students learning. Is the learning valuable for both designing a repair of existing products and designing for repair when conceiving a new product? 

Response 4: To address the first part of this review, we discussed the impacts of this research on future product design practice between the lines 401-410.

We discussed whether this assignment is valuable for both designing a repair of existing products and designing for repair when conceiving a new product between the lines 411-421 to address the second part of this review.

Point 5: There are obviously other existing approaches to designing for sustainable eco-centred products and some thoughts on how the insights from this work compliment, add too, or otherwise  an impact on these approaches would be an interesting part of the discussion. 

Response 5:

We wrote about how the insights from this work compliment other existing approaches to designing sustainable products between lines 388-400.

Reviewer 2’s constructive comments were very helpful for the manuscript to reach its potential and strengthen the arguments. We carefully addressed all the reviews and tracked the changes that we made to the manuscript in the Word document. We hope Reviewer 2 will find the paper improved.