Applications virtually augmenting real experiences for behavioral change

Abstract

Design for Sustainability is a research area based on a multidisciplinary approach, which has become increasingly important in recent years. Among the several approaches to Design for Sustainability emerged in the past decades, great attention is paid to the “Design for sustainable behavior” approach, used to design products that can impact on users' behaviors, through embedded smart technologies, e.g., Internet of Things (IoT). In fact, IoT systems are able to "dialogue" with the users, supporting the identification of any misbehavior, and suggesting more sustainable ones. The authors identified the opportunity to design and develop AR interactive applications aiming to generate awareness about the impact of humans on Earth, make people reason about how they can directly contribute to limit the expansion of this problem and induce their behavioral change. The applications are meant to engage users in an active process of exploring and discovering informative contents and to foster them to elaborate a personal and critical vision and change their bad habits. Specifically, this paper presents two case studies about the design and development of Augmented Reality applications and IoT products to be used for supporting users towards more conscious food consumption in their daily life, in order to reduce food waste.