Reversible reconfiguration: a key for reuse

This paper firsts identifies new product life cycle strategies under the post mass production paradigm to reduce production volume to a manageable size. One of the key issues of these life cycle strategies is multiple reuse by reconfiguration in which old products exhibit different functions for different purposes. Reconfiguration facilitates multiple reuse of a product that performs a different function or behavior. Because reconfiguration often involves disassembling processes, irreversible connection methods lead to deterioration of reconfigured products. To avoid this problem, this paper proposed the concept of reversible reconfiguration. As an example, the paper illustrates the design of the conference bag of this conference (EcoDesign´99) which has, three interchangeable functions