Product design, affordances and resource efficiency

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Our long-term goal is to use design to increase environmentally conscious behavior (ECB) in individuals. Much engineering effort has led to more resource-efficient products. However, consumer behavior can easily offset anticipated gains intended by resource-saving modes and technologies. Therefore, in addition to creating more efficient products, designers should also develop products that encourage and enable users to behave in more resource-efficient ways. The short-term objectives are to determine and develop methods that 1) identify innovative principles relevant to ECB, 2) incorporate such principles into products using affordances, and 3) investigate the effectiveness of such affordances and other interventions._____________1. Identify innovative principles from lead users and biological phenomenaWe will continue to identify novel insights by studying lead users in resource conservation. Lead users have needs in advance of, or more often or intensely than, the general population, and thereby offer insights beyond what can be obtained by studying average users. A significant challenge lies in continuing to identify different types of lead users who offer insights relevant to the mainstream population. We plan to consider expanded definitions of lead users and to simulate lead-user situations to extract further insights. Biological phenomena have long inspired ideas for sustainability, but less work exists that identify sustainable behaviors from biological analogies. My laboratory has spent over a decade developing, validating and refining a tool that identifies biological analogies to engineering problems. We will use this tool to search for relevant principles from biological phenomena. For example, organisms that must survive in extreme environments have been called “champion adaptors”, and can be considered a form of lead users. _____________2. Identify and incorporate affordances that support ECB While studying concepts that support ECB, we noted that product characteristics that enable ECB tend to be more accurately described as affordances than functions. Therefore, we became interested in affordances, and specifically how affordances can be used to design products that support ECB. Affordances have been described as possible ways of interacting with products. Affordance-based methods emphasize what users will think of doing with objects, not just as idealized notions of the functions that objects perform. As such, affordances enable designers to better understand product designs from the user’s perspective, which may lead to insights on how users can be guided to interact with the product in different ways. We aim to identify and incorporate affordances into products as interventions to support ECB._____________3. Interventions, applications, situations and individual characteristics After researching, developing and discussing potential interventions for ECB, it is clear that different interventions work to different degrees for different applications and situations on different people. We aim to better understand the interaction between intervention type and application, situation, and individual characteristics. We plan to first explore the appropriateness and effect of interventions for different applications/situations, but expect that other relevant factors will emerge during our study. We will investigate whether interventions that are effective for certain applications are likely to be effective for different applications, and will evaluate interventions by testing them on participants. We intend that our findings will enable designers to select and combine interventions to maximize ECB participation. This has clear benefits for Canadians, who can hopefully lead in this global effort.