‘‘Designing-in’’ sustainable behavior

A nudge in the right direction

ser Centered Design (also referred to as customer centered development, people

U centered design and sometime user centered innovation) has evolved considerably
over the past two decades. From its limited origins within usability design and
testing, the approach is now recognized as being much broader. In terms of best practice,
UCD brings together a number of recognized techniques and disciplines – such as
ethnography, along with human factor design, industrial design and usability testing – and
integrates them into a cross functional product development process. Overall, the general
aim is to enable development teams to establish and understand user value insights –
usefulness, usability, and desirability – and build these into a design from the first concepts.
However, UCD’s evolution has not stopped there. The growing importance of ‘‘sustainable
design’’ and reducing the environmental impact of products has seen the development of a
relatively new practice based around the core ‘‘user focused’’ principles. Called ‘‘User
Centered Design for Sustainable Behavior’’ or ‘‘Design for Behavioral Change’’, this
approach applies user insights in the creation of innovative solutions that will influence user
behavior to reduce the social and environmental impact of products during use. Essentially,
by understanding the user, it becomes possible to use design to effectively nudge users
towards more sustainable product use.
And, the results of this approach are products like Unilever’s development of the washing
powder tablet, the Wattson from DIYKyoto and most recently the ECO pedal system from
Nissan.

Focus on the user

The fact is that despite the recognized importance of looking at all phases of a product’s life
cycle – raw materials, manufacturing, distribution, use, end of life – the majority of
eco-design, or design for sustainability, efforts still tend to be focused on cleaner production,
creating more efficient products and recycling issues. The ‘‘use’’ phase of products, which
offers significant improvement potential and is where the greatest environmental impact of
electrical and electronic products often occurs, is regularly neglected in sustainable design.
Even when attention is paid to the use phase, it is often the impacts that are influenced by the
manufacturer that are considered, with little attention paid to the user. Yet, it is the way that
users interact with a product that can often strongly influence the environmental impact of a
product. Part of the problem is that encouraging people to change their behavior towards
more sustainable product usage is not easy, and to date the approaches used have tended
to rely on education, penalties and incentives. But these have typically failed to deliver
sustained change within consumers.

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However, increasingly there is recognition that designers are in a position to change the way
that products are used and, for instance, how their energy consumption is managed by the
user. Through user centered design techniques, design teams can not only understand user
wants, but determine how users behave, and by using this knowledge they can then directly
influence and govern – through the products themselves – user-product interaction with the
aim of improving the sustainability of product use.
This evolution of user centered design practice has been detailed by two recently published
papers (Lockton et al., 2008; Wever et al., 2008) and is the subject of the ‘‘design-behaviour’’
website[1]. This latter resource has been specifically developed to ‘‘support designers and
engineers in exploring how design can influence user behavior to reduce the social and
environmental impacts of products during use’’.
While these sources report there is no one way to design for behavioral change, they do
indicate a number of user-centered design strategies that can be used for inducing
sustainable behavior. Two of these are Eco-Feedback and Scripting.

Encouraging change
The Eco-Feedback strategy is – as noted by the design-behavior website – based on the
theory of making tangible the links between action and consequence through visual, aural or
tactile means. It adds that such feedback is already used by designers as a safety measure,
to confirm an action has been performed correctly.
In the case of Eco-feedback, the aim of the design strategy is to link actions with
environmental and social consequences. This is typically done by presenting to users, in an
appropriate format, information on the impact of their current behavior. This enables them
make the informed decision as to whether to change this behavior, or not. And, by making
people aware of information that normally remains hidden, and doing so in real time, the
indications are that there is an increased chance that they will be influenced to make better –
environmental conscious – decisions.
One ‘‘new’’ product that uses eco-feedback to influence behavior is the award winning
Wattson. This is a ‘‘design conscious’’ wireless energy monitor developed by DIY Kyoto
(www.diykyoto.com) which aims to reduce energy consumption and costs by making
consumers more aware of the energy used by household devices. Information from the
household electricity meter or fuse box is transferred directly to the Wattson which uses both
numbers and colors to show exactly how much energy a home is using at any given moment.
A simple graphic display shows usage in total kilowatts consumed, £’s, $’s or e’s, while a
graduated light indicates energy usage – with a blue glow indicating low energy usage and
a red glow warning high.
Wattson’s internal memory records up to 4-weeks of energy use history which can be
uploaded to the user’s computer via a USB lead. The user can then access daily, weekly,
monthly and yearly energy consumption data using ‘‘Holmes’’, an energy monitoring
program developed to accompany Wattson. As well as looking good, DIY Kyoto claims that
Wattson can reduce the electricity usage of an average household by up to 20 per cent.

Steering behavior
Scripting or Behavior Steering is about creating designs, features or even using materials
that encourage users to behave in certain prescribed ways. Again, this approach is
established in traditional design and is typically used to ensure a product is used correctly.
An obvious example is the use of cables with male and female connectors. While, as the
‘‘design-behaviour’’ website notes, a polystyrene cup, for instance, contains the script ‘‘hrow
me away after use’’ where as delicate bone china tea-cups imply the need for careful,
considered behavior.
In the case of sustainable behavior steering, the approach is about creating obstacles to
unsustainable use, or making sustainable behavior so easy, it is performed almost without
thinking about it. A prime example of eco-scripting is Unilever’s washing tablets. The main
impact of most detergents is the use phase. Unilever found that through user centered

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 research studies that their customers tended to use more washing detergent than needed to
ensure a good result. To counteract this practice, they designed tablets which prescribed
the correct amount of detergent to use – reducing the amount of detergent used and
chemicals disposed of whilst increasing the efficiency of the wash, ensuring ease of use and
maintenance performance. The amount of packaging required was also reduced.
Finally, when it comes to influencing users, combining two or more design strategies is likely
to be more effective, and potentially help overcome and ‘‘resistance’’. This appears to be the
approach taken by Nissan Motor Company with the new Eco Pedal System.
With its sights set on helping drivers to become more fuel-efficient it has developed a new
accelerator pedal that can ‘‘correct’’ inefficient driving behavior. When in use, the ECO Pedal
system is fed data on the rate of fuel consumption and transmission efficiency during
acceleration and cruising, and then calculates the optimum acceleration rate. If the driver
exerts excess pressure on the accelerator, the system counteracts with the pedal push-back
control mechanism – helping to inform the driver that they could be using more fuel than
required.
In addition, an eco-driving indicator integrated into the instrument panel feeds the driver with
real-time fuel consumption levels and indicates the optimal level for fuel-efficient driving.
Driving within the optimal fuel consumption range, the indicator is green. It begins to flash
when it detects increased acceleration before reaching the fuel consumption threshold and
finally turns amber. Again, the aim being to advise and help improve the driver’s driving
behavior. The ECO Pedal system can be turned on or off according to the driver’s
Keywords:
preference.
Innovation,
Product design, Nissan plans to commercialize the ECO Pedal during 2009. Research conducted by Nissan
Industrial design, has shown that by using the ECO Pedal drive system, drivers can improve fuel efficiency by
Customers 5-10 percent, depending on driving conditions.

Note
1. The Design-Behaviour web site resource is aimed at students, academics and industrialists in
Engineering Design, Human Sciences, Industrial Design, Product Design and Built Environment
disciplines, available at: www.design-behaviour.co.uk

References
Lockton, D., Harrison, D. and Stanton, N. (2008), ‘‘Making the user more efficient: design for sustainable
behaviour’’, International Journal of Sustainable Engineering, Vol. 1 No. 1.

Wever, R., van Kuijk, J. and Boks, C. (2008), ‘‘User-centred design for sustainable behaviour’’,
International Journal of Sustainable Engineering, Vol. 1 No. 1.

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