Why Your Storage is Always Full: Identifying Design Opportunities to Support Divestment of Households’ Unused Products

Journal article, 2025

This study explores which unused products are retained in households and discusses design opportunities to facilitate their divestment, bringing them back into use. Exploratory visits to 20 households were conducted, each comprising a sensitizing activity, an interview, and a tour of the households’ storage. The study revealed various types of unused products retained in the households; products with potential utility, products with emotional significance, and those that were unwanted by the household. Three key factors driving the retention of these products were identified. First, many households retained items due to the perceived product benefits, hoping they would be useful again in the future. Second, the divestment conscience, the consumers’ apparent desire to ‘do the right thing’ with a product, made it challenging to divest certain products as households struggled to find a satisfactory way to do so. Overall, the perceived effort required to divest products, the perception of divestment work, emerged as a major barrier, influencing all divestment scenarios. The paper discusses the opportunities for design to address these factors, to support divestment of the various types of unused products in households.