Sustainable behaviour: A framework for the design of products for behaviour change

Abstract

The increasing concern for sustainability-related issues leads to the rise of new fields in design research, dedicated to limit the negative impact of human activities on the environment and society. After addressing issues related to production, efficiency, recyclability and disassembly, designers start to recognize their responsibility in guiding users to behave in a more responsible and sustainable way. For this reason, designing products to support users’ behaviour change is becoming one of the most popular trends in design research at the moment. To achieve the desired results design for behaviour change, and in particular, Design for Sustainable Behaviour exploits a variety of approaches. In this Chapter, we explore the use of Design for Sustainable Behaviour techniques through a literature review of theories and case studies. Then, we defined a framework which describes the use of multisensory stimuli as elements to support different phases of interaction during the user experience with an interactive product. We relate this framework to previous works and then we discuss two case studies.