Product design, affordances and resource efficiency

产品设计、可供性和资源效率

• 批准号: RGPIN-2014-04627
• 负责人: Shu, LH
• 金额: $ 1.97万
• 依托单位: University of Toronto
• 依托单位国家: 加拿大
• 项目类别: Discovery Grants Program - Individual
• 财政年份: 2018
• 资助国家: 加拿大
• 起止时间: 2018-01-01 至 2019-12-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nserc-crsng.gc.ca/ase-oro/Details-Detailles_eng.asp?id=665120
• 关键词: Product; design; affordances; resource; efficiency

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 phenomena**We 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.

我们的长期目标是使用设计来增加个人的环保行为(ECB)。许多工程方面的努力导致了更多资源节约的产品。然而，消费者行为很容易抵消资源节约模式和技术带来的预期收益。因此，除了创造更高效的产品外，设计师还应该开发鼓励和使用户以更节约资源的方式行为的产品。短期目标是确定和开发方法，1)确定与欧洲央行相关的创新原则，2)将这些原则纳入使用负担能力的产品，3)调查这种负担能力和其他干预措施的有效性。*_**1.从铅使用者和生物现象中识别创新原则**我们将继续通过研究铅使用者在资源节约方面的新见解来确定新的见解。领先用户的需求先于普通用户，或者比普通用户更经常或更强烈，因此提供了超出通过研究普通用户所能获得的洞察力。一个重大的挑战在于继续识别提供与主流人群相关的见解的不同类型的主要用户。我们计划考虑扩大铅用户的定义，并模拟铅用户的情况，以获取进一步的见解。**生物现象长期以来激发了可持续发展的想法，但从生物类比中识别可持续行为的工作较少。我的实验室花了十多年的时间来开发、验证和改进一种工具，该工具可以识别工程问题的生物类比。我们将使用这个工具从生物现象中寻找相关原理。例如，必须在极端环境中生存的生物被称为“冠军适应性”，可以被认为是一种领先用户。2.确定并纳入支持欧洲央行的负担能力**在研究支持欧洲央行的概念时，我们注意到，使欧洲央行能够发挥作用的产品特征往往更准确地被描述为负担能力而不是功能。因此，我们开始对可负担性感兴趣，特别是如何利用可负载性来设计支持欧洲央行的产品。负担能力被描述为与产品互动的可能方式。基于启示的方法强调用户将如何处理对象，而不仅仅是对象执行的功能的理想化概念。因此，负担能力使设计师能够从用户的角度更好地理解产品设计，这可能会导致对如何引导用户以不同方式与产品互动的见解。我们的目标是确定负担能力并将其纳入产品中，作为支持欧洲央行的干预措施。*_**3.干预措施、应用、情况和个人特征**在研究、开发和讨论欧洲央行的潜在干预措施后，很明显，不同的干预措施对不同的应用和情况对不同的人产生不同程度的作用。我们的目标是更好地理解干预类型与应用、情境和个体特征之间的相互作用。**我们计划首先探讨干预措施对不同应用/情况的适当性和效果，但预计在研究过程中会出现其他相关因素。我们将调查对某些应用程序有效的干预措施是否可能对不同的应用程序有效，并将通过在参与者身上测试来评估干预措施。我们的目的是，我们的发现将使设计师能够选择和组合干预措施，以最大限度地提高欧洲央行的参与。这对加拿大人有明显的好处，他们有望在这一全球努力中发挥带头作用。