Design for sustainable behaviour

The global impact of designed goods and the role designer’s play in accelerating rapid, conspicuous consumption has long been recognized within the profession. As such, considerable effort has been directed towards reducing or mitigating negative environmental impacts caused by mass-manufacture and disposal through so called ‘end of pipe’ solutions. Less attention, however, has been placed on reducing the impact of use despite tacit acknowledgement among the design community that sustainable designs cannot reach their full potential without targeting user behaviour. Through increased focus on behaviour, and the implementation of suitably informative or persuasive strategies, designers can purposefully alter the way users interact with products to leverage more sustainable use patterns. This chapter provides design practitioners with an introduction to Design for Sustainable Behaviour (DfSB). This is an emergent field of design practice which seeks to understand user behaviour in order to drive the development of products which encourage more sustainable use. Integrating inspirational case study examples drawn from their own and others’ practice, the authors chart the origins of DfSB and describe its theories, strategies and design processes. Tools to aid strategy selection are introduced and key ethical considerations reflected on in relation to specific design phases. The authors offer practical advice on designing, installing and evaluating design interventions based on experience and conclude with a discussion of the current limitations and potential future developments in DfSB

Making the user more efficient: Design for sustainable behaviour

User behaviour is a significant determinant of a product’s environmental impact; while engineering advances permit increased efficiency of product operation, the user’s decisions and habits ultimately have a major effect on the energy or other resources used by the product. There is thus a need to change users’ behaviour. A range of design techniques developed in diverse contexts suggest opportunities for engineers, designers and other stakeholders working in the field of sustainable innovation to affect users’ behaviour at the point of interaction with the product or system, in effect ‘making the user more efficient’. Approaches to changing users’ behaviour from a number of fields are reviewed and discussed, including: strategic design of affordances and behaviour-shaping constraints to control or affect energyor other resource-using interactions; the use of different kinds of feedback and persuasive technology techniques to encourage or guide users to reduce their environmental impact; and context-based systems which use feedback to adjust their behaviour to run at optimum efficiency and reduce the opportunity for user-affected inefficiency. Example implementations in the sustainable engineering and ecodesign field are suggested and discussed

Design for sustainable behaviour: Investigating design methods for influencing user behaviour

This research aims to develop a design tool for product and service innovation which influences users towards more sustainable behaviour, reducing resource use and leading to a lower carbon footprint for everyday activities. The paper briefly explains the reasoning behind the tool and its structure, and presents an example application to water conservation with concept ideas generated by design students

Integrating ethics into design for sustainable behaviour

Consumer behaviour contributes significantly to society's impact on the environment. Through products, designers can shift user behaviour towards more sustainable patterns of consumption, bridging the intention-behaviour gap between values and everyday actions. Design for sustainable behaviour (DfSB) aims to reduce the negative environmental and social impacts of products by moderating users' interaction with them. DfSB strategies have been categorised on an 'axis of influence', which correlates increased product control with a corresponding reduction in user interaction and choice. The process of designing for sustainable behaviour has been modelled within existing literature, yet these models fail to account for, and fully integrate, inherent ethical considerations. This paper presents a design process model with corresponding ethical assessment tools that may better equip designers to influence consumption patterns without compromising users' autonomy and privacy, thus bridging a gap in current knowledge

Design for sustainable behaviour: strategies and perceptions

This paper presents selected findings of doctoral research exploring how design could be used to influence user behaviour towards more sustainable practices. It describes three strategies for changing user behaviour through design drawn from literature and outlines the methodology and findings of a case study exploring the application of these strategies in sustainable design. Drawing on the perceptions of design professionals interviewed in response to one of the concepts generated, the paper goes on to explore the perceived acceptability and effectiveness of these strategies. It concludes by commenting on the wider implications of these perceptions for ongoing research

Affordances, constraints and information flows as ‘leverage points’ in design for sustainable behaviour

Copyright @ 2012 Social Science Electronic PublishingTwo of Donella Meadows' 'leverage points' for intervening in systems (1999) seem particularly pertinent to design for sustainable behaviour, in the sense that designers may have the scope to implement them in (re-)designing everyday products and services. The 'rules of the system' -- interpreted here to refer to affordances and constraints -- and the structure of information flows both offer a range of opportunities for design interventions to in fluence behaviour change, and in this paper, some of the implications and possibilities are discussed with reference to parallel concepts from within design, HCI and relevant areas of psychology

The future of design for sustainable behaviour revisited

At the 2009 Ecodesign conference the results of a survey on the future of Design for Sustainable Behavior (DfSB) was presented. In this paper, the survey is revisited, and responses from both surveys are compared and discussed. The contribution of theoretical fields, research priorities, integration in business, and the location and position of DfSB are discussed. The current discourse on behavior versus practice oriented research is addressed, and the paper concludes with thoughts on how DfSB may further mature as research area

Modelling the User: How design for sustainable behaviour can reveal different stakeholder perspectives on human nature

Copyright @ 2010 TU DelftInfluencing more environmentally friendly and sustainable behaviour is a current focus of many projects, ranging from government social marketing campaigns, education and tax structures to designers’ work on interactive products, services and environments. There is a wide variety of techniques and methods used—we have identified over 100 design patterns in our Design with Intent toolkit—each intended to work via a particular set of cognitive and environmental principles. These approaches make different assumptions about ‘what people are like’: how users will respond to behavioural interventions, and why, and in the process reveal some of the assumptions that designers and other stakeholders, such as clients commissioning a project, make about human nature. In this paper, we discuss three simple models of user behaviour—the Pinball, the Shortcut and the Thoughtful—which emerge from user experience designers’ statements about users while focused on designing for behaviour change. We characterise these models using systems terminology and examine the application of each model to design for sustainable behaviour via a series of examples

Design for sustainable behaviour: a quick fix for slower consumption?

The continuous replacement of durable consumer goods and disposal of functioning or repairable products into UK landfills or, increasingly, to developing countries, has resulted in global environmental and social consequences. Small appliances, which are easily disposed of in household waste, typically end up in UK landfills, are shipped to developing countries or otherwise ‘lost’. Very few are recycled or repaired, yet many are still functioning when disposed of. Consumers’ willingness, opportunity and ability to carry out repairs have historically been hampered by a range of complex factors. Design for Sustainable Behaviour (DfSB) aims to reduce the environmental and social impacts of products by moderating users’ interaction with them. This paper explores how DfSB strategies can be used to encourage a behavioural shift towards repair of small electrical household appliances by overcoming identified barriers. The paper pulls together literature on repair practice, highlighting gaps in current knowledge and outlines the findings of an extensive UK household survey focused on both product breakage rates and consumer mending behaviour. Three mending typologies and associated personas resulting from the analysis are combined with three DfSB strategies to develop conceptual design interventions to encourage repair. The paper concludes with a discussion of the potential efficacy of the design outcomes from a consumer perspective and the potential ramifications for design practice, whilst considering the wider influences on repair practices beyond design and how these may be addressed

Evaluating feedback interventions: a design for sustainable behaviour case study

Design for Sustainable Behaviour is an emerging research area concerned with the application of design interventions to influence consumer behaviour during the use phase towards more sustainable action. However, current research is focussed on strategy definition and selection with little research into understanding the actual impact of the interventions debated. Here, the author’s present three themes as different entry points to the evaluation of a feedback intervention designed to change behaviour towards a sustainable goal: an evaluation of the behaviour changed by the intervention; an evaluation of the interventions functionality; and an evaluation of the interventions sustainable consequences. This paper explores these themes through a case study of a physical feedback intervention prototype designed with the intention of reducing domestic energy consumption through behaviour change whilst maintaining occupant comfort. In this paper, the authors suggest that questions for evaluating functionality and usability are dependent upon the intervention strategy employed; questions for the evaluation of behavioural antecedents and ethics are applicable to all intervention strategies; finally, questions for the evaluation of sustainable metrics are dependent upon the interventions context. More universal lines of questioning are then presented based on the findings of this study, suitable for cross-study comparison