Design students in higher education often lack hands-on understanding and tools for designing Human-Robot Interaction (HRI). While many commercially available educational robot platforms require users to have extensive training or prior experience, we developed ADA, an entry-level robot prototyping platform, for design students without any previous background in robotics and programming to better explore and conceptualize HRI design concepts in the early stages of design processes. This paper reports on the design and development of AIDA, along with our pedagogical reflections on its implementation with bodystorming techniques in an interaction design course over the past two years. Our findings show that using AIDA with bodystorming enabled students to rapidly prototype HRI concepts by tinkering with available materials, generate design concepts in situated contexts, and foresee potential unintended HRI consequences from a user’s perspective. For platforms with similar goals, our study suggests that hardware and software accessibility is important for designers to easily conduct HRI concept exploration and prototyping. The tinkerability of the platform proves handy particularly when used in bodystorming for designers to identify interaction problems and rapidly prototype and test solutions. The in-situ perspective, where designers “become the robot” and dynamically switch between the roles of user and robot, facilitates a tacit understanding of what robots can and cannot do when interacting with users in their activities.

 This paper reports on the practical application of a recently developed design tool, Shame Cues, which is a card deck created to help designers understand, reflect upon, and discuss social concepts related to shame and other self-conscious emotions. It consists of 64 cards divided into 16 categories, explaining how shame manifests itself in society and through concepts such as awkwardness, guilty pleasures, euphemisms and taboos. The tool has been tested in various workshops and for different contexts, mainly concerning social challenges focusing on stigma and taboos. Changing the focus toward sustainability, this paper reports on applying Shame Cues in the context of waste disposal and littering. While Design for Sustainable Behaviour provides a rich repertoire of design strategies to stimulate sustainable practices, scrutinizing the user research that has informed these littering cases reveals that aspects of shame, guilt, and hedonistic motivations have received limited attention. Addressing sustainable behaviour through a “shame lens” may lead to different insights about the suitability of Design for Sustainable Behaviour strategies and open for more empathic approaches rather than forceful ones. For this case study, the tool was made available to professional designers and design researchers without prior focused attention on shame as part of user research. The workshop was recorded and analysed, and the results were jointly discussed. This allowed for conclusions on two levels, considering both theme and method. Firstly, how can using the shame perspective inform the design process and expand the solution space in the context of littering? Secondly, what is the learning potential for designers when encouraged to look through a “shame lens”, in comparison to the default situation of applying design for sustainable behaviour strategies in which shame does not play an explicit role?

Acknowledging the inherent complexity of many sustainability challenges, and the shortcomings of traditional linear approaches in tackling them, we have seen a rise in design-driven approaches, which are deemed better suited in handling socio-cultural, economic and environmental implications. Existing literature shows that products and services guided by EcoDesign concepts have the potential to promote users’ behaviour towards a sustainable direction. However, due to the primary focus on the material aspect of design (e.g. environmental impact, reusability and recyclability), there is a lack of guidance for incorporating the behaviour perspective of users into the design research phase. This research aims to develop a framework to help designers determine factors that can possibly impact the behaviour of the target user. The study draws on theoretical insights obtained from a non-exhaustive literature review (observed to be driven by Global North perspectives) and a meta-synthesis of five case studies, primarily situated in the Global South. The findings showed that to influence users’ behaviour through design interventions, the designer would need to account for various determinants. We summarized these determinants into three lenses—context, culture and intent and then developed a conceptual framework based on these lenses. We believe this framework can guide designers in selecting relevant user behavioural determinants in their design research phase, thus supporting them in identifying what factors should be considered for introducing design interventions to promote sustainable behaviour.

New food delivery systems with returnable packaging are currently being implemented to reduce the amount of single-use packaging waste. This study aims to study the behaviour of the users of these services, gaining a better understanding of the environmental impact of the usage process by considering the users' doings. A simplified life cycle assessment is conducted based on qualitative data gathered through interviews, surveys, and user diaries. This assessment is taking, as a reference, a Spanish company which offers returnable packaging, and it involves the participation of consumers who use this type of packaging. The study applied the outcomes of the returnable packaging usage process and compared them with single-use packaging, considering different consumer choices, such as transportation for collecting the packaging. The results of the analysis show a significant percentage of CO2 allocated to the container transport compared to the other activities carried out throughout the cycle of use of the packaging such as its cleaning, or how it is handled together with the food. Based on these findings, a preliminary packaging design is proposed, considering the design lens for sustainable behaviour and the less environmentally sustainable behaviours identified in the analysis data. Understanding the environmental impact of the different steps in the process of using these packaging enables the optimisation of the service and packaging so that the user can take and recognise more sustainable alternatives when ordering returnable packaging.

This paper reports on the practical application of a recently developed design tool, Shame Cues, a card deck created to help designers understand, reflect upon, and discuss social concepts where shame and other self-conscious emotions play a central role. It consists of 64 cards divided into 16 categories, explaining how shame manifests itself in society and through concepts such as awkwardness, guilty pleasures, euphemisms, and taboos. The tool has been tested in various workshops and for different contexts, mainly concerning social challenges focusing on stigma and taboos. Changing the focus toward sustainability, this paper reports on applying Shame Cues in the context of waste disposal and littering. While Design for Sustainable Behaviour provides a rich repertoire of design strategies to stimulate sustainable practices, scrutinizing the user research that has informed these littering cases reveals that aspects of shame, guilt, and hedonistic motivations have received limited attention. Addressing sustainable behaviour through a “shame lens” may lead to different insights about the suitability of Design for Sustainable Behaviour strategies and open for more empathic approaches rather than forceful ones. For this case study, the tool was made available to professional designers and design researchers without prior focused attention on shame as part of user research. The workshop was recorded and analysed, and the results were jointly discussed. This allowed for conclusions on two levels, considering both theme and method. Firstly, how can using the shame perspective inform the design process and expand the solution space in the context of littering? Secondly, what is the learning potential for designers when encouraged to look through a “shame lens”, in comparison to the default situation of applying design for sustainable behaviour strategies in which shame does not play an explicit role?

The Design for Sustainable Everyday Life course aims to provide students with three theoretical lenses (behaviours, activities, and practices) to understand and develop design interventions that improve sustainability by impacting people’s everyday doings. This paper reports on the result of and our reflections on the course over the past two years with a particular focus on identifying the challenges and benefits that the students faced in learning and employing the three different theoretical lenses in sustainable design. We found that facilitating students to apply theoretical lenses that are typically outside of their previous design education constitutes a challenging task in the course, let alone presenting students with three theoretical lenses on the topic of design for sustainable everyday life. However, results show that the three lenses supported students in choosing an appropriate unit of analysis and systematically developing sustainable design interventions at a target level. Moreover, the course also offered an entry point for students to (re)discover and align their existing understanding of design with new concepts introduced by the lenses. Furthermore, the analytical and design approach that the lenses advocate also enabled students to explore and experiment with different design intervention strategies to influence people’s (un)sustainable daily doings.

Over the past decade, the field of design for sustainable behaviour (DfSB) has gained agrowing amount of research interest. However, as the field evolves, new challenges also arise.A suitable unit of analysis is needed to contextualize users’ behaviour issues in a broadersocio-cultural and long-term perspective. This paper explores the use of activity theory(AT) as a potential lens for guiding empirical analysis and design exploration in DfSB. Byemploying a meta-synthesis approach, we systematically search and synthesize existingstudies that adopted AT in design for sustainability. Key findings show that AT’s principlesand theoretical implications are especially useful for helping design researchers frame andaddress DfSB challenges. We argue that by taking activity as the unit of analysis, the AT lenscan enable researchers to incorporate users’ dynamic, multi-level and complex activitysystems into DfSB considerations.

The world keeps changing more rapidly. Induced by context change disruptions such as individual life-course changes and macro socio-economical events, the way people carry out their everyday life doings is also undergoing a dynamic transition process, which may open up windows of opportunity for design to transit people’s behavior in a more sustainable direction.

A successful behavior transition entails not only changing people’s wrongdoings but also retaining the existing desired doings. However, over the last decade, the field of Design for Sustainable Everyday Life seems to have grown accustomed to the concept of change. The potential role that design may play in retaining people’s existing sustainable doings has been ill-addressed. This dissertation aims to develop an activity-based theoretical approach to help design researchers and practitioners better understand how people transit behavior when they undergo context change disruptions, and further explore design implications informed by the sustainable behavior retention perspective.

The study comprises two parts. In the first part, six explorative case studies were used to investigate the applicability of adopting activity theory (AT) as a theoretical lens for understanding context change-induced behavior transition phenomena. As a result, an AT-based framework was iterated, developed and validated. In the second part, by incorporating the proposed framework with the theoretical understanding generated from a prescriptive meta-synthesis study, an AT-informed toolkit prototype was developed and evaluated.

Three key findings can be identified. First, at a conceptual level, the study reveals that the design for sustainable behavior retention perspective may complement the design for behavior change perspective by facilitating a bottom-up and context-focused relative approach to achieve sustainability. Second, at a design analytical level, three dimensions of AT: i). hierarchical structure, ii). long-term development and iii). reality-based contextual scales of analysis are especially useful for systematically analyzing the impacts of context change disruptions on people’s everyday life doings. Third, at a design synthesis level, the AT-informed design toolkit prototype and the extracted design implications can provide a systemic view that helps designers take both sustainable behavior change and retention perspectives into early-stage design ideation.

The contribution of the dissertation is two folds. First, it introduces the perspective of sustainable behavior retention into the field of Design for Sustainable Everyday Life. Second, it provides an activity-based theoretical framework as a potential lens for designers to better cope with context change disruptions.

Recent developments in eco-design have shown a growing interest in incorporating user perspectives in sustainable product and service design. However, users’ needs and behavior are not static, but under a dynamic transition process. Design purely informed by user needs thus may lead to environmental and social sustainability issues. In this paper, we approach this sustainable design challenge from an activity theoretical perspective. First, we conducted a literature review on the use of activity theory (AT) in sustainable design-related studies. Based on the literature insights, we translated the abstract AT concepts into more descriptive and practical design implications. Following that, we developed an activity-centered design (ACD) toolkit prototype to support design practitioners in integrating users’ dynamic activities with specific sustainable design goals in the early-stage design ideation process. Finally, we evaluated the practical use of the toolkit with both design experts and participants without a design background in a case study. Results indicated that the ACD toolkit prototype allowed participants to engage with complex sustainability issues while taking multiple aspects of users’ activity into account. It also offered an interactive way for designers to better develop early-stage design ideas to solve sustainability-related problems from a product and service design perspective. 

On-pack date and storage labeling is one of the direct information carriers used by the food industry to communicate product shelf-life attributes to consumers. However, it is also one of the major factors that contribute to consumer food waste issues. This study aims to systematically understand the existing tensions within the current date and storage labeling system and explore the potential opportunities for design to intervene. First, we conducted a literature review to identify tensions that the consumer encounters in their food edibility assessment system and summarize the corresponding proposal for actions. 12 tensions and 16 proposals for action were identified and further framed according to a conceptual model developed in this study. Following this, the literature findings were refined and grounded in co-creation sessions in consumer workshops and industry practitioner interviews to develop specific labeling-related design implications. The findings indicate the importance of investigating the role that date and storage labeling play from a system level. Furthermore, we suggest that the conceptual model developed in this study can be used not only as a framework that guides researchers to identify and analyze labeling-related food waste problems that each individual consumer encounters, but also as a guideline that assists packaging design practitioners in exploring potential design opportunities to solve the problem from a system perspective.