Designer-User Validation of a Method for Predicting Cognitive Interventions for Sustainable Product Design

Abstract

Life cycle assessments to measure the environmental impact of products is often limited by a lack of information about the use phase of a product. To aid this gap by encouraging sustainable user behavior from the early brainstorming and prototype phases of product development, principles of environmental psychology and sustainable product design can be linked through determinants of pro-environmental behavior and cognitive interventions included as product features. A study will be completed to validate these relationships by surveying participants on their determinants, grouping participants into personas that share similar determinant ratings, then pitching sketch prototypes developed with corresponding cognitive interventions and measuring their receptiveness to each sketch prototype. To aid in the development of this sketch prototype evaluation survey, a series of user interviews were conducted with the sample use case of factors that encourage the use of reusable water bottles to better understand how users may evaluate the products depicted in the sketch prototypes. Validating the links between determinants and cognitive interventions can assist designers in determining a hierarchy in the determinants they design for and more efficiently select effective cognitive interventions for users with different experiences.