Novel Framework for Incorporating Consumer Preferences and Public Goals into Engineering Design Applied to Energy Technologies

是什么驱使消费者选择采用保护公共泳池资源的产品，而不是继续使用目前低效和/或污染的方法？设计师如何才能不顾社会和经济障碍，创造出鼓励人们采用的产品？在工程设计工作中，对用户选择和行为的理解和建模是常见的，以预测市场份额、用户偏好和消费产品的最优设计，其中购买动机充足。然而，这些有价值的工具不太常见，而且明显不太容易应用于产品设计，在这些产品中，用户接受是实现公共社会、环境、经济和安全目标的关键。例如，智能和高效的家用电器和车辆可以显著节省能源，但可能会降低便利性，并且对用户来说代价高昂。然而，只有当这些技术足够可取和负担得起，足以鼓励大部分用户采用，同时表现得足够好，以满足整个社会的公共目标时，这些技术才会产生影响。由于复杂的约束系统、相互关联的变量、相互冲突的目标和不同的市场细分，这种微妙的平衡往往很难实现。这项研究的结果将帮助设计师开发可能达到实现公共目标所需的消费者接受水平的工程产品。该项目还将通过一门关于农村家庭能源和相关留学机会的独特课程吸引学生。本课程将涵盖这项研究中涉及的问题，并为学生提供了解农村和服务不足的社区所需的实地考察技术。这项研究的目标是创建和演示一个建模框架，该框架能够更严格地将消费者偏好和公共目标考虑整合到工程设计决策中。这将通过以用户为中心的设计、计算社会科学、环境心理学、基于使用情景的设计和基于代理的建模等技术的新颖集成来实现。总框架将在设计家庭能源相关技术的背景下得到广泛展示。一个多学科的协作者团队将把新的和现有的真实世界数据与用户环境的当前状态、技术选择、潜在的行动和战略、社会规范和效用函数的模型结合起来，以预测消费者的态度、选择和采用行为。这一采用模型将被整合到由PI在国家科学基金会先前的支持下开发的现有系统级模型中，以根据一套整体目标来预测技术战略的结果。模拟结果将使工程设计人员了解整个社区能源系统中各种策略所产生的复杂结果。

What drives consumers to choose to adopt products that protect common pool resources rather than continuing with current inefficient and/or polluting methods? And how can designers create products that encourage adoption despite social and financial barriers? Understanding and modeling of user choice and behavior is common in engineering design efforts to predict market share, user preference, and optimal design for consumer products where purchase motivation is plentiful. Yet these valuable tools are less commonly, and notably less easily, applied to the design of products where user uptake is key to meeting public social, environmental, economic, and security goals. For example, smart and efficient appliances and vehicles can provide significant energy savings but may offer reduced convenience and be costly to the user. Yet these technologies will only have an impact if they are desirable and affordable enough to encourage adoption by a large fraction of users, and simultaneously perform well enough to meet the public goals of society at large. This delicate balance often is difficult to achieve due to the complex system of constraints, interrelated variables, conflicting objectives, and diverse market segments. The findings of this study will help designers to develop engineered products that are likely to achieve consumer adoption levels required to realize public goals. This project also will engage students through a unique course on rural household energy and related study-abroad opportunities. The course will cover issues addressed in this research and provide students experience with fieldwork techniques needed to understand rural and underserved communities. The objective of this research is to create and demonstrate a modeling framework that enables a more rigorous integration of consumer preference and public goal considerations into engineering design decisions. This will be achieved through a novel integration of techniques from user-centered design, computational social sciences, environmental psychology, usage context-based design, and agent-based modeling. The general framework will be demonstrated extensively in the context of designing household energy-related technologies. A multidisciplinary team of collaborators will combine new and existing real-world data with models of the current state of the user environment, technological options, potential actions and strategies, social norms, and utility functions to predict the consumer attitude, choice, and adoption behavior. This adoption model will be integrated into an existing systems-level model developed by the PI with prior NSF support to predict the outcomes of technological strategies in terms of a holistic set of objectives. Simulation results will inform engineering designers about the complex outcomes generated by various strategies across a community energy system.