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Making the user more efficient: Design for sustainable behaviour

This article – the first in the new International Journal of Sustainable Engineering – introduced a people-centred design perspective to discourse on the environmental impact of consumer products and services.

While technological advances can increase efficiency, people’s everyday interaction with products and services can have a significant effect on resource use: there is an opportunity for ecodesigners to learn from other fields that have addressed behaviour change. This article, co-written by Lockton with Harrison (ecodesign) and Stanton (human factors), identified key approaches to influencing people’s behaviour from multiple disciplines (including psychology, behavioural economics, quality engineering and computer science), and discussed how they might be translated in the context of redesigning consumer products and services. These diverse perspectives – involving techniques outside ecodesigners’ usual ambit – had not previously been brought together in this context.

The article has been cited by ecodesign researchers in the UK, USA, Thailand, South Korea, Norway, the Netherlands and Ireland, including in work on energy literacy, sustainable clothing design, Kansei engineering, social aspects of design and urban planning. It was referenced in PLoS ONE (Wu et al. 2013) on promoting sustainable behaviour through building design, and in Environment and Planning journal (2012) on libertarian paternalism in the context of government behaviour-change policy.

The article’s main theme – the possibilities of applying people-centred design to behaviour for environmental benefit – was expanded through the Design with Intent Toolkit (see Lockton’s REF Outputs 2 and 3) and in Lockton’s role in subsequent projects: Empower/CarbonCulture (Technology Strategy Board), on workplace energy use behaviour; and, currently at the RCA, SusLabNWE (Interreg IVB), on domestic sustainability.