Create new scenarios for sustainable life style:
This involves socio-cultural innovation and alteration.
In many cases, a large proportion of products environmental impact is caused by its use by the consumer. Strategies such as reducing energy consumption can help, but often it is the behaviour, rather than the product itself that is inherently unsustainable. Designers should therefore think about how they can design products to encourage not only more sustainable use of the products themselves, but also more sustainable lifestyles in a broader sense. In this case the focus is not as much on the introduction of recent technology or production solutions, but on promoting new qualitative criteria that at the same time are environmentally sustainable, socially acceptable and culturally attractive.
Encouraging more sustainable behaviour can have far greater benefits than any incremental improvements in product efficiency. However, changing behaviour requires different thinking, and a successful design positively influences people’s lives. Think carefully as people don’t always act as you’d expect, and a poorly conceived design could make things worse. Any attempt to change user behaviour should also involve careful risk calculation for the company.
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 and stick with the default setting on the washing machine, afraid of investigating the others. Individual behavioural decisions are responsible for a significant proportion of household energy use. This issue goes beyond simply the “removal of barriers to behavioural change” identified by Stern [8]: 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. While there is growing recognition that “designers are in the behaviour business”, there is little general guidance available for design teams briefed with influencing user behaviour.
The Design with Intent (DwI) method aims to complement and support these approaches, addressing the deficiency outlined above, by suggesting relevant design techniques for influencing types of behaviour, and providing examples of how similar problems have been tackled elsewhere. The starting point of the DwI Method is the existence of a product, service or environment—a system —where users’ behaviour is important to its operation, or where it would be strategically desirable to alter the way it is used.
There are two ‘modes’ in which the method can be used, inspiration and prescription, depending on how the designer or design team prefers to make use of it. In inspiration mode a subset of the most important patterns is presented as a ‘toolkit’ or ‘idea space’), also made available online as a reference for designers (www.designwithintent.co.uk). In prescription mode, the designer expresses the brief in terms of one of a set of ‘target behaviours’, each of which has particular design patterns associated with it.
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Architectural patterns
Positioning and layout,
Material properties,
Segmentation and spacing,
Orientation, Removal,
Movement and oscillation.
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The Architectural Lens draws on techniques used to influence user behaviour in architecture, urban planning and related disciplines such as traffic management and crime prevention through environmental design (Crowe 2000;
Katyal 2002; see also the Security lens). While the techniques have been developed in the built environment (e.g. Alexander et al. 1977), many ideas can also be applied in interaction and product design, even in software or
services, which are effectively about using the structure of systems to influence behaviour.
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Error proofing patterns
Defaults, Interlock,
Lock-in and Lock-out,
Extra step,
Specialised affordable,
Partial self-correction,
Portions,
Conditional warnings.
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The Errorproofing Lens treats deviations from a target behaviour as 'errors' which design can help avoid, either by making it easier for users to work without making errors, or by making errors impossible in the first place ( Shingo
1986; Chase and Stewert 2002; Grout 2007). This view on influencing behaviour is often found in health and safety-related design, medical device design and manufacturing engineering.
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Persuasive patterns
Self-monitoring,
Kairos, Reduction,
Tailoring, Tunnerlling,
Feedback through form,
Simulation and feedforward,
Operant conditioning,
Respondent conditioning,
Computers as social actors.
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The Persuasive Lens represents the emerging field of persuasive technology (Fogg 2003), where computers, mobile phones and systems with interfaces are used to persuade users: changing attitudes and so changing behaviour
through contextual information, advice and guidance.
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Visual patterns
Prominence and visibility,
Metaphors,
Perceived affordances,
Implied sequences,
Possibility trees,
Watermarking,
Proximity and similarity,
Color and contrast.
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The Visual Lens combines ideas from product semantics, semiotics, ecological psychology and Gestalt psychology about how users perceive patterns and meanings as they interact with the systems around them, and the use of
metaphors (e.g. Saffer 2005; Barr et al.2002).
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Cognitive patterns
Social proof, Framing,
Reciprocation,
Commitment and consistency,
Affective engagement,
Authority, Scarcity.
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The Cognitive Lens draws on research in behavioural economics looking at how people make decisions, choice architecture (Lockton et al 2009c) and how this is affected by heuristics and biases (Kahneman et al. 1982). If
designers understand how users make interaction decisions, that knowledge can be used to influence interaction behaviour. Where users often make poor decisions, design can help counter this.
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Security patterns
Surveillance, Atmospherics,
Threat of damage,
What you have,
What you know or can do,
Who you are,
What you've done,
Where you are.
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The Security Lens represents a 'security' worldview, i.e. that undesired user behaviour is something to deter and/or prevent though 'countermeasures' (Schneier 2003) designed into products, systems and
environments, both physically and online, with examples such as digital rights management. From a designer's point of view, this can be an 'unfriendly' and, in some circumstances unethical view to take, effectively treating
users as 'guilty until proven innocent'.
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• http://www.henkel.com/press/product-innovations-34955.htm
• http://www.espdesign.org
• http://itemsweb.esade.es/wi/research/iis/publicacions/
2011-03_SustainableInnovationStrategies.pdf
• http://www.d4s-de.org/manual/d4sChapter03.pdf
• Vezzoli, C., Manzini, E., (2008) Design for Environmental Sustainability, Springer LONDON.
• Dan Lockton, D. and Harrison, D., Design for Sustainable Behaviour: investigating design methods for influencing user behaviour. The Centre for Sustainable Design,
http://www.cfsd.org.uk
• Thompson, A. W., (2010) Towards Sustainability-driven Innovation through Product-Service Systems. Thesis, Dept. of Mechanical Engineering, Blekinge Institute of Technology, SWEDEN.
• Crul, M.R.M. and Diehl, J.C. (eds) (2009) Design for Sustainability: a step-by-step approach, United Nations Environment Programme, Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands.
• Stern, N 2007, Stern Review: The Economics of Climate Change, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
SPREAD Sustainable Lifestyles 2050 is a European social platform project running from January 2011 to December 2012. Different societal stakeholders – from business, research, policy and civil society – have been invited to participate in the development of a vision for sustainable lifestyles in 2050. This process will result in a roadmap for strategic action that will identify opportunity spaces for policy, business, research and civil society to take action to enable more sustainable lifestyles across Europe.
In recent years, we have witnessed the emergence of more sustainable products, services and experimental bottom-up initiatives. They have signalled new hope that more sustainable ways of living are achievable for all while celebrating diversity, in post-industrial societies. Despite these developments, existing promising sustainable living practices are not enough. They remain dwarfed by the unsustainable impacts of the average European’s current lifestyles. To overcome the current challenges of our unsustainable lifestyles, the SPREAD project has developed future scenarios of possible societies that support more sustainable ways of living.
Source:
http://www.sustainable-lifestyles.eu/fileadmin/images/content/D4.1_FourFutureScenarios.pdf
