Designing Products to Enable Environmentally Significant Behaviour

• Main Author: Srivastava, Jayesh
• Other Authors: Shu, Lily H.
• Language: en_ca
• Published: 2012
• Subjects: Product Design; Environmentally Significant Behaviour; 0548
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/1807/33544

Resources such as energy and water are forecasted to become scarcer in the future. The traditional engineering approach for dealing with this problem can be compromised by the rebound effect. Therefore, it is important that we design products that also encourage users to engage in pro-environmental behaviours, also known as environmentally significant behaviours (ESB). Lead-user theory was first applied to the problem of ESB, resulting in the discovery that resources, when presented in discrete instead of continuous form, enable conservation. The principle was verified empirically. A method was developed to help designers develop products that implement the discretization principle without compromising user needs. Affordance theory was also applied to the problem of ESB. Two methods, one to expedite the finding of affordances and the second to change a product’s affordances to enable ESB, were developed. The application of design theory and techniques to the ESB problem shows promise.