Is your machine a “masochist’s coffee maker”?

Every machine that stops has a cost. But the highest cost isn’t the failure itself—it’s a design that never took into account the people who would have to get the machine running again.

In this issue we talk about Design for Serviceability: what it means to design a product with field technicians in mind, not just production costs and performance.

You’ll find a technical deep dive on how to rethink your R&D approach, the perspective of someone who has led service in major industrial groups, and a special invitation to experience our answer to this challenge firsthand.

Design for Serviceability: the antidote to the “Masochist’s Coffee Maker”

Have you ever taken apart a machine and thought: “Whoever designed this has clearly never had to repair it.”

That’s exactly the problem Design for Serviceability (DFS) is meant to solve. DFS is a design approach focused on making products easy to repair and maintain throughout their operational life.

In his well-known essay The Design of Everyday Things, Donald Norman describes objects so poorly designed that they make their users suffer: confusing instructions, counterintuitive shapes, frustrating mechanisms. The same kind of “masochism” can be found in many industrial machines, where reaching a worn component often means dismantling half the machine.

DFS turns this logic upside down and brings back to the center a figure that is often overlooked during R&D: the technician. The person who has to get their hands on the machine at two in the morning to restart a production line. The one who must identify a fault in minutes, replace a component without special tools, and put everything back together with no margin for error.

In our latest article we explore what DFS actually implies in practice—and how the design decisions made in the first 20% of the development cycle determine up to 85% of future operating costs.

Read the article

Expert Talks with Edgardo Ferrero: service at the heart of design

Have you ever thought of your maintenance technicians as the most valuable resource for your R&D department?

Very often B2B companies operate in silos: one team designs the product to maximize day-one performance, while another has to deal with its problems in the field for the next ten years.

In the latest episode of our podcast Expert Talks, we discussed this with Edgardo Ferrero, Service and Quality Director with more than 25 years of managerial experience across the Automotive and HoReCa sectors, in companies such as Stellantis and Cimbali Group. Together we explored the cultural shift required to implement Design for Serviceability: breaking down the wall between product design and Field Service in order to turn service into a real driver of profitability.

Edgardo touches on several crucial topics: from intuitive machine usability to the future shortage of skilled technicians, all the way to the role of product modularity and agentic AI (autonomous AI agents capable of interacting with devices and software).

One idea in particular captures the urgency of this shift:

“Service is not ‘After Sales’. It needs to be involved from the concept stage. If you don’t bring Field Service into the design process, you’re ignoring your biggest source of free insight.”

Take inspiration from someone who has turned service into a pillar of product innovation. Watch the full episode and subscribe to the Things5 YouTube channel (the interview is in Italian, with English subtitles available).

Meet Things5 at SPS Italia

From May 26 to 28 we’ll be in Parma for SPS Italia, where we’ll present our vision of automation: machines and production lines equipped with a real expert on board, designed to simplify the user experience.

With Genuin, even the most complex machines become proactive: they train operators, diagnose and resolve faults, and manage spare-parts reorders directly from the machine display. But the value of Genuin goes further. By integrating machine data with production software, it becomes the gateway to the entire factory ecosystem—from technical procedures to management systems.