Design for remanufacturing is a process of considering the remanufacturing characteristics into production design. Due to the lack of defined remanufacturing knowledge, decision making schemes for DfRem are subjected to subjective factors, such as subjective preferences and experience of the designers, resulting in indecisive decision-making for design schemes. In order to obtain the best design scheme objectively, a hybrid multi-attribute decision making method for remanufacturing design based on subjectivity reduction is proposed. First, matter-element theory is adopted to characterize design characters and demands information. Coupled with design principles, the initial design scheme can then be obtained. Second, the evaluation criteria system is established from technical, economic and environmental perspectives. Third, entropy weight and vague set are used to obtain the optimal design scheme via multi-attribute decision-making. Finally, the design for remanufacturing of motor disassembly machine is taken as the example to demonstrate the feasibility and applicability, and the results show that the proposed method is effective and feasible.