Temperament-based toy design for preschoolers: A persona profiling framework for cleaner production and consumption through emotional durability

Children's toys contribute to resource waste through premature disposal, with over 80% discarded within months of purchase. Despite efforts in sustainable material design, behavioral factors discussed in relation to early disposal remain underexplored. This study develops a temperament-based persona profiling framework for preschoolers (3–6), translating behavioral tendencies into 15 actionable design dimensions to inform a design-oriented approach to emotionally durable toy development. The framework synthesizes the Inventory of Children's Individual Differences and Children's Behavior Questionnaire within a practitioner-facing Five-Factor Model vocabulary. An integrative literature review identifies gaps in aligning emotional durability with resource-efficient manufacturing and consumption, positioning user–product alignment as a theory-informed rationale for addressing early disposal through design reasoning. The paper presents a conceptual design framework, with an empirical component functioning as a bounded diagnostic layer for procedural coherence. The framework is operationalized through an illustrative application with 221 caregivers, using a condensed, object-centered input format for early-stage design reasoning. Manual feature coding indicated that the exemplars addressed 60–70% of the framework's dimensions per trait, consistent with partial coverage of the trait–feature matrix. Within this scope, outputs translate the rule-based mapping of caregiver-reported dominant tendencies to illustrative design profiles, with routing coherence examined through bounded diagnostic checks. Theoretical propositions are discussed in relation to SDG 12 by framing emotional durability as a rationale for longer use, and SDG 9 by framing behavioral profiling as a potential input for design-facing production planning. The framework informs ongoing discussions of circular product-service systems and child-centered eco-design strategies.