![]() The first type are users who already want to change their behaviour towards a ‘good’, already known form of behaviour and technology is designed to help them in that pursuit. Implicitly, three types of potential users can be distinguished in these strategies. The goal of these approaches is to design ‘products in such a way that unsustainable behaviour is made difficult or impossible, while sustainable behaviour is made easy or easier, or even automatic’ (Wever, Van Kuijk, and Boks 2008). After briefly summarizing these different DfSB approaches proposed in design literature, this section presents four typical examples taken from this body of literature, which are in the next section used to illustrate the points of concern raised by different authors commenting on these approaches.Įlias, Dekoninck, and Culley ( 2007, 2009a, 2009b), Lockton, Harrison, and Stanton ( 2008), Wever, Van Kuijk, and Boks ( 2008), Lilley ( 2009), Bhamra, Lilley, and Tang ( 2011), Tang and Bhamra ( 2012) and Zachrisson and Boks ( 2012) all present similar orderings of design strategies for developing products that ‘may stimulate desired behavioural patterns or help avoiding undesired ones’ (Zachrisson and Boks 2012). Literature on DfSB has focused on identifying, developing and ordering design strategies to induce or enable more sustainable user behaviour, and at applying these strategies in, mostly fictive, design cases. Design for sustainable behaviour approaches Moreover, following Shove ( 2010), the paper argues how the behaviour and practice paradigm are like chalk and cheese in the sense that they form fundamentally different ways of approaching issues of sustainable consumption.Ģ. The argument will be illustrated by four examples from the DfSB (and persuasive technology design, which is here grouped under DfSB) literature concerning refrigerators, electric kettles, televisions and showers. It will do so by arguing how limitations of current approaches, as represented in existing literature, can be traced back to the paradigm of individual behaviour change. This paper reflects what such a focus could mean for sustainable design research.ĭrawing on literature in the areas of social science, environmental policy and design, the main objective of this paper is to argue that practice theory is an alternative conceptual framework for forms of sustainable design that are directed at domestic energy consumption. Recently, this idea of focusing on practices instead of behaviours has spread to the area of sustainable design. They propose practice theory – a group of theories from sociology – as a promising alternative basis for environmental policy development (Røpke 2009 Shove 2010 Spaargaren 2011 Gram-Hanssen 2011 Hargreaves 2011 Doyle and Davies 2012). Critics of these approaches argue that the focus on individual behaviour change is limiting. In policy-oriented research, similar efforts aiming to ‘motivate people to behave more sustainably’ through policy measures exist (e.g. These concerns partly originate from and show strong similarities with ongoing debates in the related area of environmental policy. However, with its success, concerns for its limitations in reaching the objective of reduced levels of household resource consumption have also risen. In the past years, the number of publications on the topic has quickly grown and products developed based on its recommendations are now available in the market, such as for example the Go-Green fridge alarm, the Eco Kettle, the ‘auto power off’ feature of many large TV brands and the ECO Showerdrop. Building on a growing number of publications in environmental policy and sustainable design, the paper then moves to explain practice theory as an alternative paradigm and argues that it shows potential to aid designers to envision change beyond the status quo and to achieve a higher effectiveness with designed interventions.Īs indicated in the call for papers for this special issue, ‘Design for Sustainable Behaviour’ (DfSB) is an emerging area of research and practice in design. Going deeper into these limitations, the paper argues that the assumptions underlying DfSB approaches may not be the most appropriate basis for approaching the complex issue of sustainable consumption. ![]() These concerns are illustrated using examples from the DfSB literature concerning refrigerators, electric kettles, televisions and showers. This paper bundles these concerns and illustrates how DfSB approaches tend to focus on incremental savings that easily disappear in larger trends, how it risks not achieving the intended behaviour change, how its literature contains a strong rhetoric of right and wrong behaviours and how opportunities for larger scales of change tend to be missed. With its success, however, concerns are also rising about its limitations. Design for sustainable behaviour (DfSB) is becoming increasingly influential in the areas of design research and practice.
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