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

是什么促使消费者选择采用保护公共资源的产品，而不是继续使用目前效率低下和/或污染的方法？设计师如何才能在社会和经济障碍的情况下创造出鼓励人们接受的产品？对用户选择和行为的理解和建模在工程设计工作中很常见，用于预测市场份额、用户偏好和购买动机丰富的消费者产品的最佳设计。然而，这些有价值的工具不太常见，也不太容易应用到产品设计中，在这些设计中，用户接受是满足公共社会、环境、经济和安全目标的关键。例如，智能和高效的电器和车辆可以提供显著的能源节约，但可能会降低用户的便利性和成本。然而，这些技术只有在它们足够可取和负担得起的情况下才会产生影响，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。由于约束、相关变量、冲突目标和不同细分市场的复杂系统，这种微妙的平衡往往难以实现。这项研究的结果将有助于设计师开发工程产品，有可能达到实现公共目标所需的消费者采用水平。该项目还将通过一门关于农村家庭能源的独特课程和相关的海外学习机会吸引学生。本课程将涵盖本研究中涉及的问题，并为学生提供了解农村和服务不足社区所需的实地工作技术经验。本研究的目的是创建并演示一个建模框架，使消费者偏好和公共目标考虑更严格地集成到工程设计决策中。这将通过以用户为中心的设计、计算社会科学、环境心理学、基于使用情境的设计和基于主体的建模等技术的新颖整合来实现。在设计与家庭能源有关的技术方面，将广泛展示总的框架。一个多学科的协作团队将把新的和现有的现实世界数据与当前用户环境、技术选项、潜在行动和策略、社会规范和效用函数的模型相结合，以预测消费者的态度、选择和采用行为。该采用模型将集成到PI在NSF的支持下开发的现有系统级模型中，以根据一组整体目标预测技术战略的结果。仿真结果将告知工程设计人员关于跨社区能源系统的各种策略产生的复杂结果。

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.