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. Introduction: Behaviour change as a challenge for designers As consumer products become increasingly efficient technologically, human behaviour is often the weak link, at a societal level but also at the scale of interaction with individual products and services. We buy ‘energy-saving’ lights and then leave them on all night, boil a kettle-full of water even though we only need a mug-full, and stick with the default setting on the washing machine, afraid of investigating the others. Individual behavioural decisions (or the lack of them) are responsible for a significant proportion of household energy use (McCalley & Midden 2002; Wood & Newborough 2003). This issue goes beyond simply the “removal of barriers to behavioural change” identified by Stern (2007): while tax incentives and social marketing campaigns have a large part to play, in many ways, encouraging more sustainable behaviour can be seen as a design problem, concerned with how and why people interact with the products and systems around them, and how the interaction that contributes to the use phase might be influenced.